Racial Threat, Suspicious, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement

Citation

Maskaly, J. (2012), "Racial Threat, Suspicious, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 35 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm.2012.18135caa.006

Racial Threat, Suspicious, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement

Racial Threat, Suspicious, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement

Article Type: Perspectives on policing From: Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Volume 35, Issue 3.

Kenneth J. Novak and Mitchell B. ChamlinCrime & DelinquencyVol. 58pp. 275-300

Public awareness of the potential or perceived bias in police officer decision making has been well documented in the media and the research literature. One of the most frequently researched manifestations of so-called racially biased policing has been in traffic stops. In order to assess the prevalence and severity of racially biased policing, many states started mandating that police officers record information related to the driver, including their racial or ethnic affiliation. Criminologists would suggest a number of reasons for disparate contact between the police and members of racial minority groups. The more traditional criminologist would assert that excess contact is a by-product of excess violations of the law; while more radical criminologist would claim that the police exert social control to maintain the racial hegemony. The authors in this paper test the racial threat hypothesis by examining data collected from traffic stops in Kansas City, Missouri. Additionally, the authors examined whether or not there was disparate treatment of drivers in subsequent action taken by police.

The authors aggregated traffic stop rates, search rates, and arrest/citation rates to the police beat level. The authors control for a number of theoretically specified characteristics to assess the independent effects of each, including crime, economic disadvantage, residential mobility, poverty, and percentage of black residents. The results suggest that with the exception of residential mobility, none of the independent variables exerts a significant effect on the rate of traffic stops in a police beat. When the traffic stop rates are disaggregated by racial group, the percentage of black residents is positively and significantly related to the stop rates for whites. When looking at the factors associated with increased search rates, apart from the rate of traffic stops, the best predictor of searches is the percentage of black residents residing in an area. When examining the citation rates a similar trend is observed, however, the percentage of black residents is only significant for the citation rates of whites. When further disaggregating the results, the authors note that it is strange that blacks have a lower stop and citations rates than do whites, although their search rate is much higher than it is for whites.

The authors conclude that the results suggest there is indeed a racial effect associated with traffic stops; however, the effect is not as simple as blacks get stopped more often than whites. Instead, the authors suggest that there is an element of suspicion associated with the decision to apply social control. Whites in beats with higher percentages of black residents draw more social control from officers at all three levels of social control; the authors claim this is likely because they are seen as being out of place. The same trend is observed for blacks that are seen as being out of place in predominantly white beats. The authors conclude by stating that they are unable to account for the situational or behavioral cues at the time of the stop; future studies should include these behavioral cues in addition to the contextual cues observed in this study.

Jon MaskalyUniversity of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA