Nationwide analysis of traffic stops and searches - Blacks vs Whites vs Hispanics (3722 hits)
Based on The Stanford Open Policing Project
Police pull over more than 50,000 drivers on a typical day, more than 20 million motorists every year. Yet the most common police interaction - the traffic stop - has not been tracked, at least not in any systematic way. Until now.
The Stanford Open Policing Project - a unique partnership between the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab and the Stanford School of Engineering - started the Open Policing Project in 2015 and began requesting such data from state after state. To date, the project has collected and standardized more than 100 million records of traffic stop and search data from 31 states.
After accounting for age, gender, and location, we find that officers ticket, search, and arrest black and Hispanic drivers more often than whites. For example, when pulled over for speeding, black drivers are 20% more likely to get a ticket (rather than a warning) than white drivers, and Hispanic drivers are 30% more likely to be ticketed than white drivers. Black and Hispanic motorists are about twice as likely to be searched compared to white drivers.
In our data, the success rate of searches (or the hit rate) is generally lower for Hispanic drivers compared to whites; so the outcome test indicates Hispanics face discrimination. For black drivers, search hit rates are typically in line with those of white drivers, indicating an absence of discrimination.
An analysis of more than 20 million stops in North Carolina since 2002 found Blacks are 95 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites and 115 percent more likely to be searched after being stopped. The research is included in a newly published book called, "Suspect Citizens."
