New data shows police target African Americans motorists
What few Americans (or at least white Americans) know is that stop and frisk is not limited to New York City. Versions of the policy are in place across the country. And just as in New York, whatever crime-fighting benefits derive from the policy come at the expense of contravening basic American principles of equal treatment under the law and of angering law-abiding minority citizens whose support and cooperation the police need to fight crime.
Until recently, there has been limited data on the degree to which stop-and-frisk policies, as opposed to other factors or police tactics, specifically cause alienation and resentment. But a first-of-its-kind survey 'Pulled Over: How police stops define race and citizenship' makes that connection quite clear.
Although it is hard to document how widely police departments employ stop-and-frisk-like tactics, the data tells the same story nearly everywhere studies have been done on who is stopped by the police: racial minorities are stopped at considerably higher rates than whites. The underlying reason for this is not racism by individual officers. Rather, it is police department directives requiring officers to make large numbers of stops just to check people out. Police departments widely favor this practice because it allows officers to proactively seize guns and drugs, in officer-initiated stops, rather than waiting to respond to crimes.
Police leaders know that it takes a lot of stops to find just a few illegal drugs or weapons. A widely used police training manual, Tactics for Criminal Patrol, declares that “criminal patrol in large part is a numbers game; you have to stop a lot of vehicles to get the law of averages working in your favor.” Or, as an officer put it to the late journalist Gary Webb, “you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.” (The irony in this statement, of course, is that law-abiding citizens are the “frogs” and criminals are the “princes.”) This numbers game helps to explain why 98.2 percent of the stops in New York City yielded no illegal weapon or drugs. This 1.8 percent “hit rate,” as Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan has shown, is no better than chance.
The key influence on who is stopped in traffic safety stops is how you drive; in investigatory stops it is who you are, and being black is the leading influence. In traffic safety stops, being black has no influence: African Americans are not significantly more likely than whites to be stopped for clear traffic safety law violations. But in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. Police focus investigatory stops on younger people, and so as people grow older they are less likely to be stopped in this way. But a black man must reach fifty—well into the graying years—before his risk of an investigatory stop drops below that of a white man under age twenty-five. Overall, black drivers are nearly three times more likely than whites to be subjected to investigatory stops.
Being black is also the leading influence on how far police officers pursue their inquisition in investigatory stops. In these stops, full-blown vehicle searches are relatively common. After taking into account other possible influences, black drivers in our survey were five times more likely than whites to be subjected to searches in investigatory stops. Searches are remarkably rare in traffic safety stops, and the driver’s race has no influence on whether the driver is searched in these stops.
These differences are not lost on African Americans. According to our survey, African Americans view normal traffic stops as legitimate exercises of law enforcement, and do so at about the same rate as whites do. Indeed, the main difference is that blacks, unlike whites, are even more likely to view a traffic stop as legitimate when the officer lectures them on driver safety, taking that lecture as a reassuring cue that they were in fact stopped for their behavior, not for the color of their skin.
The numbers game that police play with investigatory stops is a recipe for giving offense to large numbers of innocent people. Pervasive, ongoing suspicious inquiry sends the unmistakable message that the targets of this inquiry look like criminals: they are second-class citizens. The vast majority of black respondents to our survey—64 percent, compared to only 23 percent of whites—said that you cannot always trust police to do the right thing. Twenty-two percent of black respondents agreed with the statement that “the police are out to get people like me.” Only 4.5 percent of whites felt this way. The disproportionate personal experience of these stops among blacks is one source of this trust gap. Another is hearing stories of police disrespect from families, friends, and work and faith networks. Among respondents to our survey, 37 percent of black drivers, compared to 15 percent of whites, reported hearing these sorts of stories from members of their own household.
The solution is to prohibit investigatory police stops. This will require a change in police norms. Police leaders celebrate investigatory stops and the few big busts they yield. Instead, these leaders—the heads of professional police associations, police chiefs, and police trainers—should acknowledge how much these stops cause palpable harm to the person stopped and to trust in the police. Departments should prohibit stops unless justified by evidence of a violation. Officers would still have the authority to make traffic safety stops to ticket or arrest drivers for speeding, blowing through red lights, or driving drunk. They would still have the authority to stop people who fit a clear description of a suspect. What they would not have the authority to do is to stop people out of curiosity or unspecified suspicion.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2014/ten_miles_square/driving_while_black048283.php