Blacks and Hispanics pulled over at higher rates, study shows
8th April 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
A massive, groundbreaking study of nearly 100 million police stops of motor vehicles across the country revealed that law enforcement officers pull over Blacks at Hispanics at a higher rate than white drivers.
The study, dubbed the Stanford Open Policing Project and conducted by researchers at Stanford University over several years of work, took a sample of roughly 93 million police stops from 21 state police agencies and 29 municipal police departments – including the New Orleans Police Department – and found that, after controlling for other variables such as time of day, law enforcement represents are also 20 percent more likely to give a traffic ticket to Black drivers than white operators. That figure jumps up to 30 percent for Latino drivers.
In addition, Black and Latino drivers are both twice as likely than white drivers to be searched during their stops. The researchers also took into account the phenomenon called “the veil of darkness,” which examines stop rates after sunset, when the race and ethnicity of different drivers are harder for police to discern when conducting stops.
The study was begun by the researchers in 2015, with an executive summary and dozens of data files released to the public in mid-March. Researchers looked at traffic stops that occurred between 2001 and 2017.
“We are very conservative in terms of what we report in our paper,” said Dan Jenson, one of the lead researchers, “but generally, there is evidence of discrimination against Black drivers in the stop decision and against both Black and Hispanic drivers in the search decision.”
Jenson said the study confirmed their suspicions of racial bias that motivated them to conduct the study at the start.
“We were not too surprised with the results,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “There were many anecdotal cases alleging the same, and the data seemed to bear that out.”
Many outside observers were also not shocked with the results, either.
“Numbers don’t lie,” said David Lowery, founder of the Living & Driving While Black Foundation, an advocacy organization calling for an end to racial profiling.
“I’m never surprised by the numbers,” Lowery told The Louisiana Weekly. “[The bias] is really a cancer, and it does a disservice to all Americans. We as Americans need to work this to get past it as a country.”
In Louisiana, the results of the unprecedented national study reaffirmed what was already expected.
“Study after study has shown – and people of color know first hand – that Black and brown drivers are disproportionately pulled over, searched, detained and tragically killed by police,” Alanah Odoms Hebert, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told The Louisiana Weekly. “Systemic reform is needed, including here in New Orleans, to combat racially-biased policing and increase transparency, accountability, fairness and public safety.”
In New Orleans, the racial skewing isn’t quite as stark as in other cities, but the data for New Orleans does show a disproportionate amount of minority drivers subjected to traffic stops by police.
Breaking down the 513,055 recorded stops in New Orleans that were tallied, more than 380,000 of them, or roughly 74 percent, were Black operators, while about 139,000, or 27 percent, were white. About 15,000 (or 3 percent), were Hispanic.
That compares to the 2010 U.S. Census population numbers, which pegged the city’s total population at 343,829, with 60.2 percent being Black, 33 percent white and 5.3 percent Hispanic.
In addition, about 64 percent of the 98,371 drivers given citations were Black, while 28 percent were white and 4.2 Hispanic.
The racial bias in the New Orleans data appears heaviest when tallying numbers of stops resulting in arrests – of the 12,127 total arrests made, 67.5 were Black and 28.8 were white.
However, interestingly, it appears Black drivers proportionately might have also been given a break – 72.9 percent of the stops resulting in no action were for Black drivers, compared to 23.3 white. In addition, the percentage of operators let off with only a verbal warning was 67.4 percent Black and 27.1 white.
Such results might show a peculiarity in which Black drivers in New Orleans are disproportionately likely to be pulled over in traffic stops, to be given a citation or arrested than whites, while at the same time also more likely to be let go with just a warning or with no action taken.
Also noteworthy is that Hispanics in New Orleans are less likely to be ticketed, arrested or stopped at all, at least compared to the general demographics of the city.
Jenson said, however, that while New Orleans was one of the localities that showed lower amounts of racial disparities in terms of traffic stops, it’s important to examine the numbers for each city on their own more closely so regional variables can be taken into account and allow for more accurate city-by-city juxtapositions.
“We avoid making city to city comparisons because there are many uncontrolled covariates, such as police policies and reporting,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “For instance, some departments will only give us citations, whereas others will give us warnings, citations and arrests, so stop rates for locations that only give us citations may under report the true stop rates.
“In terms of search decisions and outcomes,” he added, “New Orleans was one of the most equitable locations we analyzed, but, again, comparisons are relative and loose, since the data collected varies by location. This is why we only report aggregate statistics in our work.”
The Stanford research project was a cooperative effort led by Sharad Goel, an assistant professor in the Stanford management science and engineering department who co-authored the study, and investigative journalist Cheryl Phillips, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an instructor in the university’s department of communications who launched the Stanford Open Policing Project in 2014.
“With Sharad’s statistical background and Cheryl’s investigatory journalism background, they wanted to tackle something like this at scale,” Jenson said.
Jenson said the law-enforcement community’s reaction to the study results has generally been muted, with many policing agencies reticent to open their files for the researchers. “Reception has been mixed,” Jenson told The Louisiana Weekly. “Some departments have reached out to us before and during the study to solicit help in improving their policies, yet many departments have been reluctant to give us their data. The majority, so far, have been rather silent on the study; to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t received any negative feedback from police departments yet.”
In March, James Pasco, executive director of the national office of the Fraternal Order of Police, told NBC News that although he hadn’t yet seen the recent Stanford study, many similar examinations of potential racial bias in policing often fail to take into account certain variables that affect the amount of minority drivers in a given area. Those variables, according to Pasco, include police patrol of higher-crime areas that also have larger minority populations, and therefore, more minority drivers.
Pasco said police officers are trained to stop drivers based on behaviors and not what a person looks like. Often, when a driver is pulled over from behind, his or her race is obscured, he said.
“We’re conscious of that potential bias, to train against it, recruit against it, and promote against it,” Pasco told NBC News. “Very few of the researchers have ever been out in a patrol car in the middle of the night and know what it’s like.”
With the release of the executive summary last month and the public still absorbing the preliminary results, Jenson said much more work needs to be done, and much more data collected and analyzed.
He said the researchers haven’t broken down and closely studied the results found in each respective locality and police agency, but they encourage anyone – journalists, law-enforcement representatives, other researchers and members of the public – to dive into the data already released and comb through the numbers for each state and city.
The study Web site features downloadable files for each location and tutorials and guides for members of the public to use to sort through the data themselves. Jenson said that New Orleans, because of its unique demographics and setting, could be a perfect subject for such closer analysis.
“[W]e hope the work we have done enables local journalists… to dive deeper into the data and explore it more thoroughly,” he said, “incorporating an understanding of the city’s context, [such as] tourism pockets, public housing projects, commuting patterns, police department goals/tactics, and levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation/integration. New Orleans would be an excellent location for such an analysis.”
Beyond that, Jenson said in an email to The Louisiana Weekly that hopefully police departments will warm to the possibilities the open-policing study offers to improve the relationships between a more effective, fairer police force and a well-served community.
“We hope this report has several effects,” he said, “1) it provides a standard of accountability and reporting for departments across the country; 2) it will spur departments to analyze and better understand their own stop data and perhaps solicit policy feedback (we have already worked with several departments to improve their practices); and 3) it will set a quantitative baseline for a domestic conversation on bias in the application of the law.”
The conclusion to the researchers’ 10-page working paper summing up the study and what hopefully will spring from it.
“Collecting, releasing, and analyzing police data are essential steps for increasing the effectiveness and equity of law enforcement practices, and for improving relations with the public through transparency,” it states succinctly.
This article originally published in the April 8, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
