Are Black drivers ticketed by police more than white drivers? A new study suggests they are. It compares tickets given via police vs. tickets given by speed cameras and finds that cameras treat everyone about the same while police decidedly don't. Here's the key chart:
The red and blue lines are for camera tickets. They're very close, suggesting that, objectively, Black and white drivers are driving about the same.
The green and magenta lines are for police tickets. Black drivers are ticketed at rates above speed cameras, but more notably, white drivers are ticketed at rates way under speed cameras. This gap is more noticeable the whiter an area is.
The study estimates the race of drivers based on where they live, which is obviously not 100% accurate. However, over the course of thousands of observations it probably averages out about right.
The best conclusion from this study is not that Black drivers are ticketed way more than they should be. It's that white drivers are routinely treated leniently in ways Black drivers aren't. You may be tired of the phrase "white privilege," but this is what it is.
"The best conclusion from this study is not that Black drivers are ticketed way more than they should be. It's that white drivers are routinely treated leniently in ways Black drivers aren't."
What is much worse is that some Black drivers are tased after being stopped, and shot when they try to run away from the jolt of tasers.
Very discouraging….
How many white men have had the police kneel on their neck until they died? Why would you suppose traffic stops would be any different?
DWB is still a thing.
Quite a few apparently, if you look at this picture.
https://apnews.com/article/associated-press-investigation-deaths-police-encounters-02881a2bd3fbeb1fc31af9208bb0e310
To hear the AP says, none of them "deserved" it. Maybe so, maybe not, I have better things to do than investigate 1000+ cases.
Gosh, you're right. Police are corrupt, violent, unthinking brutes.
I've been saying for years now that police need to be paid more, trained more, and fired more, with the third part of that being the most critical. Jobs in law enforcement should not have any expectation of job security.
The article you link to notes, “The toll, however, disproportionately fell on Black Americans”.
It almost looks like the police are carrying out a program of terrorizing black drivers.
This isn't how I was told the world worked when I went to Safety Town to learn traffic rules.
When I was in grad school, 35 years ago in the Bay Area, I got pulled over once on campus over my time there, for doing 45 in a 25 zone. I got away with, "Please drive more slowly next time, Professor". (I wasn't going to tell them I was just a student.)
My one black classmate over that same period got pulled over by the campus police three times, all for driving the speed limit and coming to full stops at the stop signs. (Which, being black, itself became suspicious. Why is he driving so carefully?? Well, he spotted the cop and didn't want to be harassed -- a classic Catch 22.)
Of those three times, once a white woman in the passenger seat was asked, "Are you alright, Ma'am?", the next time he was pulled out of the car and frisked, and the third time the cop pulled a gun and aimed it at a white person in the back seat who thought he was being helpful by leaning forward and demanding to know what was going on.
So yeah, slightly different treatment there. Would it still be the same today? Hopefully not as many places as back then, but still far too many.
Seems though there is a constant offset - the two lines don't cross.
Ah, an opportunity for me to again plug disaggregated data — would show if there were differences in age and/or gender between black and white driver populations.
There could be other factors at play, such as tolerance for being slightly over unless you have a recent past ticket.
So that shows the blacks run red lights at a greater frequency than whites.
The cameras were placed where they'd catch more poor people. That offset was bad enough, but...
I believe the x-axis is mislabeled. it should be "share of drivers on the road", not "share of white drivers on the road". i.e. for the pink and red lines, it is share of white drivers, for the other two lines it is share of black drivers. Otherwise, you'd have to believe that in 100% white areas, 90% of the traffic stops are black people. In reality the chart is saying that where the black population is zero, they still make up close to 20% of stops.
No, it says that in areas where the share of white drivers approaches 100% there is a 90% chance of getting stopped if you happen to be black. That is, 90% of the black drivers in those areas get stopped. Not that 90% of the stops are of black drivers.
This.
Urgbat, I think you are correct about the label on the x axis. Also, the label on the y axis should be "share of police stops".
Pretextual stops. Tie up a lot of resources for little gain. Indeed, they slow responses to 911 calls and, when it was still active, shot spotter alerts. And the people stopped, late for jobs, lost salary and maybe even lost jobs. Doesn't seem to really affect car jacking, stolen cars, robbery sprees, etc.
Shot spotter is (still) active in SF and Oakland I believe.
Unless you're stopping cars without plates or plates that are marked stolen... which, seems like the only pretexts for stops well, aside from say, 'you're missing a wheel' or throwing sparks or smoking or something immediately harmful.
Maybe the Black drivers could change their racial identity to white, resulting in a reduction in harassment.
Oh, wait, that’s not how biology and bigotry work.
Sorry, nevermind.
In 1987, I was 22, my parents had bought me a nice SAAB 900S to go to grad school in at Cornell, and I was visiting my sister in Boston. I got stopped on the NYS Thruway near where it crossed over into Mass. The state trooper told me that some older couple had sworn out a complaint saying that I'd driven recklessly. Now,
(1) the only time I'd been off the thruway was to stop at a gas station to consult my map
(2) I'm quite sure I wasn't driving recklessly: I was maybe 5mi over the limit and driving in the right-hand lane.
(3) after he stopped me and told me all this, and I opened my mouth to speak, in perfect English with a Texas accent, he said he was letting me off with a caution, and disappeared lickety-split.
Gosh, I wonder what happened there. Well, me with my "honorary white" privilege, I was puzzled: couldn't figure it out. But today? Haha, it's simple: he saw a "number one young male" (that is to say, dark-skinned enough to be black) driving a late-model expensive foreign car, and figured he should flag the guy down b/c he might have stolen it. He profiled me, is all. No biggie. Gosh, no harm done, ossifer.
ACAB.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence on how police treat Blacks vs. Whites and while sometimes persuasive, it is still just anecdotal. While I believe much of it is accurate, I can get a little skeptical. One thing that stuck in my mind was when I heard the anecdotally supported idea that police were shooting unarmed Blacks at a very high rate just was not borne out by the data.
That's why studies like this are so useful. Because it is apparently not anecdotal. Kudos to the people who designed this study.
Yeah, Sam Richards has shown the numbers before in Sociology 119 at Penn State. The numbers of unarmed individuals killed by police each year is low.
Anecdotal?
Fuck, man, this isn't an anecdote.
Me telling you that even on a little blog like this you can meet someone (me) whose father was shot and killed by a cop in a bad traffic stop? That's an anecdote.
"The study estimates the race of drivers based on where they live"
Yeah it just so happens that the police more actively patrol some places. Like where there are more calls. So it kinda makes sense that more tickets are written where there are more police.
And that there are more police where there is more crime.
The race( bat) signal goes up and Atticus swoops in to save the day! Atticus White Privilege Panic mode engaged!
What's interesting is that the graph seems to show that traffic enforcement is very lax in areas with very low white driver populations. Which are exactly the areas where Atticus would think there is more crime.
I learned about white privilege back in the early 70’s. Two unrelated stories a few months apart caught my eye. One involved a drunk driver who was black and had the bad luck to rear-end a car that was driven by the LAPD chief of police. It was a minor fender bender. No one was injured and the accident caused a couple of hundred dollars damage. The story was told amusingly about the guy’s bad luck getting arrested by the LAPD Chief. His sentence was a few weekends in jail and to take some DUI type classes. Sounds fair, right?
The other story was the (white) president of Pepperdine University drank an entire bottle of vodka before driving home from work. He rear ended a woman and her daughter who were stopped on the side of the road. The collision set the woman’s car on fire and she and her daughter were incinerated. His sentence was to give speeches about the evils of drunk driving. The judge indicated that the poor man had suffered enough so there was no point in incarcerating him.
Just something I always remembered and think about when I listen/read people talking about equal justice under the law.
Two people wete burned alive, and the sunny beach just got '"community service"? Now that is a miscarriage of justice.
Worse, in California any death in commission of a felony (like drunk driving) holds a murder sentence and we had teens sentenced to life in prison for the death of their passengers.
The authors’ approach is novel and clever and they may well have found a pattern of discrimination, and future studies may confirm this. What might this study's shortcomings be? Some attempts below.
1) The graph from the study compares camera "tickets" vs. police "stops". Tickets and stops aren't the same thing.
2) Cameras are only going to give tickets for a limited number of infractions. Police stops can be for all types of infractions. The study should have compared for only the same infraction types for camera tickets vs. police stops.
3) The density of police cars on the road will surely increase the number stops per day. In higher crime areas, I assume there are more cop cars on the road since more resources are applied for fighting crime in those areas. The study could have accounted for this.
This isn't even the beginning of the shortcomings. The paper argues that speeding camera data can be biased due to placement of cameras, then uses speeding camera data as its comparative measure! Speeding cameras are not randomly and uniformly distributed -- they are going to capture a different population of offenders than traffic stops.
Another, subtler problem is that the disparity between camera data and traffic stop data -- the result -- would have been known to the authors already. For example, people were making this exact argument back in the early 2000s in DC, noting that the population caught on speeding cameras was whiter than the population caught in traffic stops. Of course, the speeding cameras were on the major commuting roads into the downtown, while the traffic stops were in the neighborhoods.
So this entire paper is an exercise in working backwards from known effects to preferred causes.
The best conclusion is that cops are scum.
Put speed cameras everywhere. Deploy them by the millions. Take this part of traffic enforcement away from police. Cheaper and way more effective.
Nope, not until you change the law for tickets to attach to the car (because cameras can't prove who was sriving) and ramp up by income (so rich people can't just pay them).
No and yes.
1) When I got ticketed by a camera some years ago the citation came with a picture that clearly showed me behind the wheel. The photo quality was very good, and trying cast doubt on it in court would have been futile.
2) If the only penalty is a fine, that means it's legal for the rich.
A couple things, and not discounting police bias particularly in Chicago.
Many years ago I was driving an ancient Plymouth convertible, top up. The outside mirror had somehow fallen off, and the plastic rear window was fairly opaque. I was on a two lanes in each direction street in San Francisco in the right lane. I got stopped. The cop seemed nice and I asked him how he noticed. He said that things out of the ordinary attract their attention, and I was going slower than most of the traffic. He first noticed that, and the the car itself probably held his attention, and then he noticed the lack of any way to see behing me.
Freddy Prinz (Latino comedian from way back) once said "in El Ay primer spots constitute probably cause". He was referring to El Ay police profiling guys like him, and at the time a lot of Latino guys might have old cars (generally Chavies for some reason) they were fixing up themselves and one step would be to fix rust spots or little dents and put primer on them, eventually getting it all painted.
(I write El Ay because I always think that LA looks like Louisiana. Fact: no one legitimately calls San Francisco anything but that, but Los Angeles is always El Ay.)
Anyway the moral to those stories is that police are looking for details that don't fit, and also often that may lead to racial profiling but not necessarily. A Dodge Charger (sedan, not an SUV) with big chrome wheels/lowered/dark tinted windows (illegal if the front seat windows, not normal if the rear window) is going to attract their attention - visible details that likely go with an increased chance of finding some illegal activity going on.
But with most cars being SUVs and some minivans, all with almost always dark tinted rear side and rear windows, you can't actually see who is inside the car from behind.
You could write it as "L.A." -- that's what Randy Newman did.
I can affirm to the primer spots:
I owned a primer black car for about eight years, and a brand new car with silver paint for about four of those. I did not drive them differently. (Passengers call my driving a bit mechanical)
The primer car got pulled over a dozen times while the silver car got pulled over twice. One got three tickets, the other two. (And I beat half of those in court).
People in the Bay Area call San Francisco, 'the City'. But that's unhelpful ^-^
Because this was done in Chicago it is very accurate to determine race by where people live.
"The study estimates the race of drivers based on where they live, which is obviously not 100% accurate. However, over the course of thousands of observations it probably averages out about right."
Only if you ASSUME that black and white drivers speed at the same rate...
In other words you assume the very thing you are trying to prove!
The study is crap, on many level, as has been pointed out by numerous people. The curves fitted are fantasy. The data looks made up (how come so many points cluster on horizontal and vertical lines), it takes one location and assumes that represents all of America, etc etc.
Maybe the police are terrible, I don't know. But a delicate subject deserves a paper written very carefully, not "let's collect together whatever random garbage data we can find, and hallucinate a conclusion that confirms everything we already believe".
lol, oh my. The white guys are in a panic.
THIS IS ALL LUDICROUS AND ABSURD!
YOU CANT ASSUME THAT BLACK PEOPLE DONT DESERVE TO BE TARGETTED!!!
You evidently missed reino2's comment directly above you. And yes, police are terrible. Talk to any black guy - yes, just about any black guy in the US, including Senator Tim Scott (R, SC) - and they can tell you stories.
I heard about a study that compared the rate of white and black motorists stopped during daylight and night hours. At night, black and white motorists are stopped at about the same rate. It's not the case during the daylight hours, where black motorists are stopped more frequently.
As far as this study, there are some obvious questions here. For instance, cameras only detect speeding and running red lights. The police may end up stopping people for many number of other violations, e.g. broken headlights or tail lights. Now, obviously there's a leeway here for the cop to either give a ticket or just issue a warning. More importantly, depending on the neighborhood, the police are liable to find more "not-road-worthy" violations.
Why would anyone be tired of a phrase that accurately describes reality?
It is a little hard to tell for sure, but the study seems to be comparing 1) tickets for speeding issued by cameras; and 2) all traffic stops by police for any reason. That is problematic because this CT study found that only 35% of traffic stops were for speeding https://www.ctdata.org/2023-traffic-stops
They really should have looked only at speeding stops. Moreover, many stops are for equipment violatons, which I would think are more likely re lower income and younger drivers, so it would have been nice to control for those factors as well.