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Study says police treat Black drivers slightly worse on routine traffic stops

Published on 14 Comments on Study says police treat Black drivers slightly worse on routine traffic stops

The Los Angeles Times draws my attention to a new study that looks at how traffic cops treat white and Black drivers during routine stops. That is, how do they speak to them? With respect? Friendliness? Or with threatening tones?

One thing I learned from this study is that the pattern of stress and intonation in language is called prosody. The other thing I learned is that officer prosody is judged to be less friendly toward Black men than it is toward white men:¹

When I see studies with results like this, I have two reactions. The first is the obvious one: that this is yet another example of how Black people are treated that's entirely invisible to white people.

But the other is that I'm surprised the difference is so small. In Study 1A, which was the primary study, the difference on a scale of 1-6 was only 0.2, or about 4%. The combined result of all three studies was only slightly higher. When you consider that Black men tend to be both younger and have lower incomes compared to white men, the racial difference here is probably quite small.

In other words, this is yet another example of trying to keep two things in mind at one time. First, Black people are treated worse than white people. Second, this gap is getting smaller and better over time. Both things are true.

¹You can read the study if you want the whole, exhausting explanation, but basically the researchers got hold of hundreds of bodycam videos of traffic stops. Then they cut out segments of each stop and blurred out the driver's comments so that only the police speech was left. Then they had people score the police speech.

14 thoughts on “Study says police treat Black drivers slightly worse on routine traffic stops”

  1. Mitch Guthman

    I think the methodology as Kevin's described it is perhaps measuring something that might be a lot different from the headline. It seems to me that what the study is measuring is more likely the effect on police officers of knowing that their interactions with people they've stopped are being recorded. What I'd like to see is how those police officers treat people, obviously including black people, when they don't think their actions are being captured on tape.

        1. jakejjj

          Ah yes, another antifa puke. When your kind thought they'd come to a small town 25 miles from where I live, their bus was met by a dozen men holding AR-15s. They immediately returned to their bus and haven't been back. LOL

  3. Clyde Schechter

    I also found it surprising that the differences were so small, so I read the article. A couple of methodological points:

    1. They restricted the study to traffic stops that did not end with an arrest. That's a serious problem: this is obviously sampling only the least contentious of interactions, and it may be that blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites following a traffic stop.

    2. It may be that this whole prosody-rating system yields a very noisy measurement. Non-differential random variation leads to reduction in the observed difference across groups. We don't know if this is happening here because they provide no assessments of the reliability of this measurement process. But I'm left feeling suspicious because in most other respects they provide considerable detail about their methods and results--why did they omit this?

    1. Maynard Handley

      I'd give a different possible confounder, namely do we know the nature of the "presentation of self" before the speech?

      If you go out of your way to present yourself as "f*** society" (prominent tattoos, mohawk hairstyle, clothes that make a statement, angry stickers on your car, drug culture indicators everywhere", you cannot be surprised when society responds with "no, f*** you" in many social interactions -- that was, after all, what you were aiming for.

      I make no claims as to the prevalence of such anti-social self-presentation amongst eg white vs black vs latino (clearly examples of all three leap to mind, but we are interested in numbers, not in salience!), however I suspect it's an important confounder that needs to be included.

  4. Lounsbury

    Leaving aside the online-Lefty knee-jerk quibbling over a study not meeting their expected results, an aspect for reflection is controling for social class (and perceived social class) in interactions. It is a plausible hypothesis that a component of white reaction in lower class whites is the perception that the ethno-racial identarian Left currently dismisses their own issues and struggles (economic and social) and White Priviledge to their perception is some egg-head fantasy (of course they do hae unperceived benefit but lower class and downwardly mobile in particular whites appear to have life experiences trending more towards historical black America, while intra-social class marriage and breakdown of social mobility leads the educated white middle class towards a different life experience).

    From a political persepective the Left response to the Trumpism is not likely to profit from urban coastal ethno-identarian Leftist political messaging but a restructured race-sensitive in design but not pitched as racial "working and [lower] middle class" political pitch.

    1. cld

      I agree complete co we should focus on improving people's lives, and the success we've had at improving lives, and at the same time the complete failure of the other side in every part of that, and their easily seen antagonism to anything at all that won't help the wealthy and harm everyone else.

      How this one, simple focus seems to elude the Democrats nationally is a great mystery. If you're a boxer your plan shouldn't be to talk some sense into your opponent, if they had any sense they wouldn't be doing that.

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