Race, Place, and Context: The Persistence of Race Effects in Traffic Stop Outcomes in the Face of Situational, Demographic, and Political Controls

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-508
Author(s):  
Kelsey Shoub ◽  
Derek A. Epp ◽  
Frank R. Baumgartner ◽  
Leah Christiani ◽  
Kevin Roach
Keyword(s):  
Police Department ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Police Chief ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Traffic Stops ◽  
Race Effects ◽  
The Face ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Municipal Police Departments ◽  
Unique Dataset

AbstractEvidence that racial minorities are targeted for searches during police traffic stops is widespread, but observed differences in outcomes following a traffic stop between white drivers and people of color could potentially be due to factors correlated with driver race. Using a unique dataset recording over 5 million traffic stops from 90 municipal police departments, we control for and evaluate alternative explanations for why a driver may be searched. These include: (1) the context of the stop itself, (2) the characteristics of the police department including the race of the police chief, and (3) demographic and racial composition of the municipality within which the stop occurs. We find that the driver's race remains a robust predictor: black male drivers are consistently subjected to more intensive police scrutiny than white drivers. Additionally, we find that all drivers are less likely to be subject to highly discretionary searches if the police chief is black. Together, these findings indicate that race matters in multiple and varied ways for policing outcomes.

Minimum Requirements for Police Chiefs in the USA

2005 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-118
Author(s):  
Richard R. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Police Department ◽  
City Council ◽  
Police Chief ◽  
Police Chiefs ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Minimum Requirements ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Municipal Police Departments

In the USA police chiefs of municipal police departments are usually selected by the mayor or city council, and often recruited from outside the local police department. To date no study has evaluated the minimum employment qualifications required by municipalities for their police chiefs. The present study involved a content analysis of 162 municipal police chief job advertisements in order to determine the minimum requirements needed in order to compete for the position of police chief. The study also attempted to determine if community characteristics such as population size, density, racial diversity, and economic affluence were correlated to the specific minimum requirements communities sought in their chiefs.

scholarly journals The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 318-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin McCrary
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Work Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
White Test ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Municipal Police Departments ◽  
Newly Hired

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on work-force composition is a 14-percentage-point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers. Evidence on police performance is mixed. Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation. However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees. (JEL H76, J15, J78, K31)

Using Web 2.0 as a Community Policing Strategy

2012 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Jones ◽  
Melchor C. de Guzman ◽  
Korni Swaroop Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Community Policing ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Policing Strategy ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Community Livability ◽  
Media Applications ◽  
Municipal Police Departments

Community policing is intended to empower citizens who are plagued by crime and disorder. Scholars have considered community policing as a proactive measure that addresses issues of disorder to prevent the occurrence of more serious crimes (Goldstein, 1986; Wilson & Kelling, 1982). In a digital age, people are increasingly interacting socially via web platforms. This digital interaction includes governments, which can interact with the citizens in their society to co-produce effective responses to criminal activity. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, iPhone applications, and Nixle provide new media for citizens and police interactions. Using a sample of 163 municipal police departments, this chapter examines the level and type of participation among municipal police departments using these resources. It is argued that Web 2.0 social media applications allow for a more fluent and dialogic relationship between citizens and police to work together to reduce crime and increase community livability. Policy and practice recommendations related to participating in and enhancing social media presence for police are also provided.

When Law Enforcement Pays: Costs and Benefits for Elected Versus Appointed Administrators Engaged in Asset Forfeiture

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siân Mughan ◽  
Danyao Li ◽  
Sean Nicholson-Crotty
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
State Level ◽  
Public Administrators ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
Asset Forfeiture ◽  
Appointed Administrators ◽  
Municipal Police Departments

The billions of dollars in assets seized by law enforcement each year represent a crucial source of revenue for these organizations, but also raise important constitutional questions and can create significant tensions within the jurisdictions they administer. Research on asset forfeiture to date has focused heavily on municipal police, largely neglecting forfeiture activities by sheriffs. Thus, it has missed an important opportunity to build theory about the differences between appointed and elected administrators and neglected an important source of institutional variation that may help to explain this particular administrative activity. To develop expectations about the relative levels of asset forfeiture and the response to intergovernmental incentives related to forfeiture, we draw on and extend scholarship comparing the behavior of elected versus appointed administrators in other settings. We test those expectations in analyses of more than 1,200 sheriff’s offices and over 2,200 municipal police departments between 1993 and 2007. Results suggest that sheriffs receive less forfeiture revenue than municipal police and are less responsive to state-level policies that change the financial rewards of asset forfeiture for agencies. These results hold whether we examine forfeitures made through the federal Equitable Sharing Program, where civil and criminal forfeiture cases can be distinguished, or jurisdictional level data on forfeiture, where civil and criminal forfeitures are combined. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both the research on asset forfeiture and on elected versus appointed public administrators more generally.

“Does daylight matter”? An examination of racial bias in traffic stops by police

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-688
Author(s):  
Anthony G. Vito ◽  
Vanessa Woodward Griffin ◽  
Gennaro F. Vito ◽  
George E. Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Racial Profiling ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Traffic Stops ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Show Evidence ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The Impact

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to draw a better understanding of the potential impact of daylight in officer decision making. In order to this, the authors test the veil of darkness hypothesis, which theorizes that racial bias in traffic stops can be tested by controlling for the impact of daylight, while operating under the assumption that driver patterns remain constant across race.Design/methodology/approachPublicly available traffic-stop records from the Louisville Metro Police Department for January 2010–2019. The analysis includes both propensity score matching to examine the impact of daylight in similarly situated stops and coefficients testing to analyze how VOD may vary in citation-specific models.FindingsThe results show that using PSM following the VOD hypothesis does show evidence of racial bias, with Black drivers more likely to be stopped. Moreover, the effects of daylight significantly varied across citation-specific models.Research limitations/implicationsThe data are self-reported from the officer and do not contain information on the vehicle make or model.Practical implicationsThis paper shows that utilizing PSM and coefficients testing provides for a better analysis following the VOD hypothesis and does a better job of understanding the impact of daylight and the officer decision-making on traffic stops.Social implicationsBased on the quality of the data, the findings show that the use of VOD allows for the performance of more rigorous analyses of traffic stop data – giving police departments a better way to examine if racial profiling is evident.Originality/valueThis is the first study (to the researchers' knowledge) that applies the statistical analyses of PSM to the confines of the veil of darkness hypothesis.

Biggest Gang in Town

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-66
Author(s):  
Darren A. Raspa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Urban Policing ◽  
Experimental Process ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
Municipal Police Departments

The police are arguably the most visible and contested apparatus of legal authority and urban power in American history. The navy blue uniform, badge, and utility belt of armaments of varying lethal potential have simultaneously been the symbols of justice, order, and security, while also representing the trappings of a virtual standing army of punitive state coercion, eliciting equal amounts of fear and admiration among the most vulnerable members of society. The traditional law enforcement historiography dictates that urban policing in its present form saw its origins in London in the first half of the nineteenth century. I contend, however, that a diverse array of social classes and communities in the American city from the mid-nineteenth century onward formed and continuously reformed the municipal police departments into their current form. This process can best be observed in the experimental process of law enforcement in San Francisco, where a diversity of political ordering and community visions competed for dominance in policing methods and ideology. The sudden convergence of a multitude of classes and ethnicities on the small peninsula of San Francisco from the late 1840s onward shaped the institution of urban policing in ways that would have national ramifications.

Fear City on Film

Dying City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Tochterman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
York City ◽  
Motion Picture Industry ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Municipal Police Departments

This chapter considers how films produced in New York City played to an emergent anti-urban political culture. With crime and disorder as the feature antagonist in the New York film cycle of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the vigilante became a vital counterpoint to the perceived incompetence of municipal police departments. Escaping the dying city also served as a powerful motif in the period’s films. The motion picture industry brings the homegrown narrative of New York to a national audience.

The Pullman Strike and the Matrix of State Institutions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
The Will ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Military

This epilogue examines how the Pullman Strike of 1894 exposed the Chicago Police Department's still quite limited ability to deal with a mass strike of such magnitude. The Pullman Strike was the largest and most important strike of the nineteenth century, with Chicago as its epicenter. It revealed as a failure George Pullman's attempt to apply a modified earlier version of order, based on the pre-police idea that a paternalistic system of organization could embed wage workers within an ordered system controlled by their employer. This strike also revealed the limits of police power, since the Chicago Police Department did not have the will or the force to break it. The Pullman Strike was primarily broken by the army, with the police department playing only a supporting role. The Pullman Strike also shows that municipal police departments were just one set of institutions within the broader matrix of state power, including the state militias and the military, that was built to maintain the businessmen's order in the nineteenth century.

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