Race, Ethnicity, and Policing: New and Essential Readings

11. Driving While Black: Bias Processes and Racial Disparity in Police Stops

Part III The Research This page intentionally left blank 261 Introduction to Part III Michael D. White The primary objective of this section is to immerse the reader in the state-of-the-art research on race/ethnicity, bias, and policing. The section includes original contributions from the top experts in the country describing their latest work in this important area. There are three persistent themes in the collection of chapters presented here. The first theme is methodological, as the research clearly demonstrates a need to collect data from multiple sources, and to examine relationships among key variables at multiple levels of analysis. Chapters by Warren and colleagues, Engel and colleagues, Parker and colleagues, and White and Saunders, in particular, capture this theme. The second theme is definitional and relates to the need to expand our conception of race/ethnicity beyond the traditional black/white dichotomy. Chapters by Fagan and colleagues and Parker and colleagues deal specifically with broadened definitions of race/ethnicity and bias. The third theme involves police behavior itself and addresses the importance of expanding the range of police activities that warrant examination. More specifically, the chapter from Fagan and colleagues expands the study of “traffic” stops to include “stop and frisk” activities by police. Also, after being overshadowed by concerns of profiling in traffic stops, questions over race and police use of force have now reemerged. The classic chapter by Fyfe, and White and Saunders ’s study of race and TASERs, highlight the importance of this theme. Each of the chapters in this section is described in more detail below. Warren and colleagues examine the impact of race on the likelihood of being stopped by both the North Carolina Highway Patrol and local police in the state. This study resonates with the methodological theme, as the authors use citizen survey data that allows them to capture a range of contextual variables that often are missing in traffic stop studies—most notably, measures of self-reported driving behavior . Warren and colleagues find that race is a significant predictor of traffic stops in the data involving local police, but not in the Highway Patrol data. They suggest that race may be less important for Highway Patrol because officers in that agency are less likely to do routine patrol work, and because race is often difficult to discern when patrolling highways (i.e., given the speed at which vehicles travel). The authors conclude by suggesting that research should be tailored based on the agency under study, and that future research should also focus on officer decision making after the stop has been made. 262 Michael D. White Engel and colleagues respond to this call in their contribution as they examine the post-stop arrest decision in traffic stops conducted by Cleveland police officers. The authors note that since data collection involving traffic stops has occurred in response to concerns over racial profiling, there has been much less interest in understanding why racial disparities might exist. As a consequence, traffic stop studies have rarely included factors known from prior research to influence police behavior, most notably citizen demeanor. Engel and colleagues examine more than forty-two thousand traffic stops by Cleveland police, and as part of their study, officers were asked to rate citizen demeanor on a scale with values ranging from civil to physically resistant. Although bivariate analysis indicate that minority motorists are more likely to be arrested , multivariate analysis shows that race/ethnicity is no longer a significant predictor of arrest when controlling for other legal and extra-legal variables—including citizen demeanor. Moreover, Engel and colleagues do find that demeanor is a predictor of arrest, and they suggest that failure to account for this influential extra-legal variable represents a serious limitation in prior traffic stop studies. Fagan et al. build on the earlier work of Fagan and Davies (2000) and offer an updated examination of the development of “order maintenance policing” in New York City. Reflecting the spirit of the third theme—a broadened conception of police behavior—Fagan and colleagues study stop-and-frisk activity by New York City police officers by examining temporal and spatial patterns of stops from 1999, 2003, and 2006. The authors report that stop rates have increased by 500 percent since 1999, despite little change in crime rates during that time. Like the earlier Fagan and Davies (2000) study, Fagan and colleagues also find that stop activity is...