A new study has concluded that "minorities are 24 to 33 percent more likely to be stopped for speeding" than white people who are driving the exact same speed. This is based on research among Lyft drivers in Florida
That sounded striking, but when I was reading through the study I noticed a brief mention of a statistical procedure the authors were unable to perform because "speeding citations are rare." Hmmm. Then I reached the main result:
Note the units. The y-axis represents citations per 10,000 hours of driving. A normal working year is about 2,000 hours, which means that white drivers got 0.022 citations per year and minority drivers got 0.029 citations per year. (This is derived from the fixed effects (FE) model on the left.)
Put another way, white drivers got 2.2 citations per century and minority drivers got 2.9 citations per century. That's a difference of 0.7 citations per century.
That's using the fixed effects model. The authors also used a machine learning model, and it concluded that the difference was 0.5 citations per century. In Florida. Among Lyft drivers.
The authors insist that their results are statistically significant. Maybe so. But who cares? When the absolute numbers are so minuscule it's hardly possible to draw any meaningful conclusions.
This is good news, if true!
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With .7 of 2.9 a very different headline would have been Black drivers get 1/3 more citations than white drivers.
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Kinda sped right through the main point, didn't you? I don't like being stopped and harassed by the cops whether or not they issue me a ticket. And if minorities are harassed more often than white people, yes I consider that bad.
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It's a sign things have gone in the right direction, at least.
precisely
Thank you! Kevin is being white guy again, unable to see the forest again.
Why are racist comments against white people allowed?
Because reasons, alright buddy?
racism is when you say white
This exactly. It doesn't really matter if it's a minuscule number of tickets - the disproportionate stops are just another piece of systemic harassment from systemic racism.
Kinda like saying "well they didn't commit an actual hate crime against you, so that slur they just said doesn't matter and isn't really racism."
...all of which is a pure distraction from the real problem, which is the structural unaccountability of police.
I skimmed the journal article quickly and have a couple of thoughts. First, I think KD's point about the units of the y-axis are a little off. A 24 to 33 percent difference in probability of having a police contact is a big deal. Getting stopped for speeding is just the thing they had good data on; it is reasonable to think this is just one indicator of a pattern that extends to other types of police stops. Second, the one potential flaw in the analysis that jumps out at me is that they did not account for region of the state, which might be confounded with race of Lyft drivers. This could be, say, a Miami effect, with police in that area being stricter about speeding and lift drivers in that area being more likely of being black or brown than in other areas of the state. Third, you would like to see better representation of uncertainty of estimates in the main figures of the paper. It would be nice to see confidence bands on those bar graphs.
Wait, I want to correct that last point. In the paper, they do provide confidence intervals in the estimates of fixed effects, just not in the bar graphs KD showed.
the corrected for "over policing", which might mitigate real world differences due to race if minority areas are being over policed.
Do you not think that, on average, more crime is committed in minority areas? If so, doesn't that warrant more policing in those areas?
One variable which the authors did not seem to control for is the density of police officers. Black drivers presumably operate mostly in black areas, and the fact is that there is more crime in black areas (in poor areas in general, but blacks are poorer than whites). There are likely to be more police in high-crime areas, increasing the probability of any driver being ticketed. How about the type of car - are older or less expensive cars more likely to be ticketed? There may be other factors which were not controlled for.
There is overall no doubt that blacks are treated differently by police, but measuring this precisely is tricky. Even experienced reporters often cite misleading totals for arrests, ignoring relevant factors other than race itself.
Given the very low frequency of speeding arrests (for Lyft drivers), this does not seem to be an example of harassment or over-policing. It would be interesting to compare this rate with stops for broken taillight, etc.
“Black drivers presumably operate mostly in black areas…”
This is probably not true, as any member of a non-majority group can tell you. It’s a lot easier for white people to spend the majority of their time around other white people than it is for black people to spend the majority of their time around other black people, because white people’s spaces have the majority of jobs, retail establishments and wealth in most urbanized areas and virtually all rural areas. (In the same way, it’s a lot harder for me - a gay man - to spend 100% of my time in the gayborhood, even if I feel most comfortable there. I have to venture out to make a living as well as to acquire a lot of daily/household necessities. My local gayborhood has only expensive groceries and clothing, and no gas stations or hardware stores.)
To me, the claim that “black people spend more time in black areas” is sort of a tautology. Otherwise would the label “black majority area” really make sense?
As stated it's a tautology. However, since the story concerns people at work, the relevant claim would be "black Lyft drivers spend more time driving for Lyft in black neighborhoods" is not obviously true; in fact, it doesn't even strike me as likely. White people are, on average, richer and therefore more willing to pay for a "cab". I would therefore expect that a disproportionate majority of Lyft customers are white.
Why was this worth bringing up at all, other than to stoke the whole “academia is too woke” fear and to provide clickbait on your own site? The study proved (at most) that there’s a small tinge of racism in issuing speeding tickets, published in an academic journal that 99.9999% of Americans would never have read or even heard of had it not been highlighted here. I would guess there are thousands of similar “significant but small effect” studies out there every year as college students have to write about something to get masters and Ph D degrees… but we never hear about any of them unless someone goes out of their way to provoke outrage. So thanks Kevin for increasing the potential outrage out there by surfacing this article.
Academia is too woke. Do you know who Pable Frieri is?
Austin asks the big question.....why do people mention things that he doesn't want to hear about?
Aren't we better of not knowing about things if they bother or upset someone? Shouldn't we hold the people accountable for the damnable act of relaying facts that bother us?
OF COURSE!
Because for a long time Kevin has been firmly in the camp of "Blacks complain too much, don't really have it that bad, and should just shut up about it because that pisses off my conservative friends and makes them be more racist". He in general is "anti-woke", but he seems to have a strong preference for complaining against anti-racism, and arguing for some degree of racism tolerance.
Go back to his Mother Jones last few years and since he moved here, and he never wastes an opportunity to try to argue against any study, article, tweet, or point that tries to highlight areas were racial disparity exists.
Taking the numbers at their face value (I am too tired to play trivial pursuit), Black drivers get approximately 25% more citations than White drivers. Is that OK with you?
It depends. Are they speeding 25% more of the time? If so, yes, I'm obviously ok with that. Is anyone claiming these citations were not valid?
Next time read the study.
"Across the two strategies, we find that minority drivers are 24 to 33 percent more likely to receive a speeding ticket for traveling the exact same speed as white drivers."
"Across two empirical strategies that control for driving speed, we find that drivers who belong to a racial minority group are 24 to 33 percent more likely to be stopped for speeding and pay 23 to 34 percent more in fines."
You're right. My apologies. I should have read more closely before commenting.
Kevin, the struggle is not over until the last nanoaggression is eliminated.
Could you tell me if you are serious about what you wrote? If so, how will we know when the "last nanogression is eliminated? Also, what is a nanoagression? Maybe you jest.
I would assume it’s a joke. Nanoaggression is still 6 months away from being a mainstream term I think
I think it may have been moved up a couple of months just by showing up here. I guess we'll see!
The telling thing is not the number of citations but the number of interactions. I remember being at a post-mass dinner at the Orange County Catholic Worker back in theirs in the wake of Rodney King and O.J. and a white man at the table commented that he didn’t believe that the police really treated Black people worse than white people. I did an impromptu survey having us go around the table (4 white guys, two Black) and have everybody say when the last time they’d been stopped by the police was and what happened. All the white guys had committed some traffic violation (I think all speeding, maybe one blown stop sign). They got a ticket. Most were at least six months in the past. Both Black guys had been pulled over in the last week on some vague pretense, had their cars searched and were let off with a warning.
I asked a group of small-town high school students how many times they'd been stopped by police in the last year. No one said more than once, except the Black kid, who was stopped seven times. IN HIS OWN TOWN.
But that is only meaningful if you know the rate at which different demographic groups act/drive in a way that warrants police interaction. If black people are speeding 20% more than white people than they should have 20% more interaction.
Both groups speed at the same rate, in fact at the lower levels 0-14mph over the speed limit, whites speed more frequently.
Oh dear Lord; has _no_ one remarked on the fact that this means seven more citations per one thousand black drivers per year?!?!And that's assuming a uniform geographical density
And we don't know if black driver's are speeding more. Without that data (and not sure how you'd get it) the absolute number of citations is irrelevant.
Disregard my comment.
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Did they count how many of those speeding tickets involved the cop drawing his weapon? Searching the vehicle? Searching the driver? Using physical force on the driver?
A black guy I worked with in the Probation Department was stopped for DWB in a white area and was choked out by the cops. When they learned he was a Probation Officer they let him go (without an apology). But I guess that wasn’t a speeding ticket.
sounds like this will probably only happen once or twice in his lifetime. low probability of happening in any given month or yea. definitely doesn't sound like a big problem to the people this will never happen to, why even focus on it?
Right?
There is a completely different interpretation available, which depends on the assumptions you are making about the methodology. In brief, it is possible to assume that all drivers average out to about the same level of speeding vs not speeding, in which case any racial differences that are detected are due to some other factor which may very well be racism.
On the other hand, it is possible to assume that police are fairly impartial in who they choose to pull over (for example, it seems likely to me that the identification of a speeding car often occurs prior to the race of the driver being identified). Under those conditions, one has to consider one final variable, which is whether the police -- once having determined the race of the driver -- are more or less likely to give a ticket to a black driver or whether there is little difference. In this second kind of scenario, the data might be interpreted to say that black drivers are slightly more likely, on the average, to speed than are whites on the average.
There is another variable, which is how fast you have to be going above the posted speed limit to be noticed by the police and pulled over. We know from general experience that you are not likely to be pulled over on the interstate for being 3 mph over the limit. And the reason for this is that police and state troopers have plenty of targets going far faster, and who yield plenty of ticket opportunities. Many of these drivers will be grateful that they only got a ticket for 75 when they were really doing 90 -- or so the literature written by police officers suggests.
This sort of analysis is distinct from stories that police tell of pulling somebody over who is already a suspect in a crime and just finding some excuse like a burned out tail light.
Having said all these scientific things, I would like to add a personal thought, that the law should treat cars more like our homes in terms of the requirements for a search -- in other words we should reinstate the Fourth Amendment as a major part of our law.
Given the number of law enforcement participation in the January 6th coup attempt and generally in white supremacist groups it's laughable to assume impartiality.
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When the absolute numbers are so minuscule it's hardly possible to draw any meaningful conclusions.
We need to reform our whole research portfolio based on this monumental insight:
No more research on rare diseases!
Seismology needs to be abandoned; the frequency of earth quakes occurring is way too small to draw any meaningful conclusions!
I could to on forever.
Kevin has really pushed off a paradigm shift of Einsteinian proportions!
In your enthusiasm I think you omitted a qualification of “large” as, per the USGS there are something like 55 detected earthquakes a day.
That frequency is worldwide. At any given location the density of earth quake is very small, even here in California.
According to Kevin's logic, no one gets speeding tickets! White drivers get 2.2 citations / century, that is almost zero!
Yeah, this. I'm not a crazy driver, nor am I on the road as much as a Lyft driver. (The last accident I was in was over 20 years ago, and was judged the fault of the guy who rear-ended me) But I've gotten I dunno...maybe half a dozen speeding tickets over my 40+ year driving career.
Another factor that just occured to me: many speeding citations are now issued by camera/radar setups, not by individual officers. That's especially true in urban areas. So "speeding citations" are a poor metric.
Another way to frame a diff between .29 and .22 is that Black drivers got stopped roughly 25% more than white drivers.
You could have made a similar case about lynching in the 1950s. Statistics are great.