Assessing Racial Profiling More Credibly

For many individuals, traffic stops are the most frequent interaction they have with police. Since the I-95 “turnpike” studies of the mid-1990s, which were primarily motivated by the widespread use of drug-courier profiles in highway enforcement along trafficking corridors, public concern has grown that urban traffic stops may also be plagued by racial profiling. Given this concern, more than 400 police agencies compile race data on stopped motorists, some voluntarily and some by order of the Justice Department. At the heart of this effort is the belief that if stop data are collected, it should be easy to assess racial bias in traffic stops. But while a spate of studies have used collected data to show whether racial profiling does in fact occur, these studies suffer from a lack of rigor that calls their findings into question. At issue is what to compare or “benchmark” the stop data against. Studies have used census data, traffic surveys, and data on trafficstop outcomes, but all these benchmarks suffer from problems, such as not accounting for driving behavior or exposure to police. Working with the City of Oakland, RAND Corporation researchers explored a more credible method to assess racial bias in the decision to stop and racial bias in post-stop activities—in particular, the decision to cite, the decision to search, and the length of the stop. The study analyzed data on 7,607 recorded vehicle stops between June and December 2003.