Detecting Racial Profiling in Minneapolis Traffic Stops: A New Approach
نویسندگان
چکیده
Being singled out for special attention from the police because of your racial or ethnic identity, rather than your actions, seems profoundly inconsistent with the principle of equal treatment under the law. Yet some racial and ethnic groups, most notably African Americans, have protested what they perceive as manifestly unequal treatment from law enforcement agencies. One area of law enforcement that has drawn considerable attention is the enforcement of traffic laws, where there has been a longstanding perception among non-white drivers that they are far more likely than white drivers to be stopped and possibly searched. In other words, they believe they have been subject to racial profiling. Because drivers from different racial or ethnic groups differ in other ways as well, convincingly demonstrating statistically the presence or absence of racial profiling has been difficult. The purpose of the present study is to apply a new approach to testing for racial profiling in traffic stops to the data for Minneapolis. We find compelling evidence of racial profiling during 2002, with many fewer qualifications than were necessary in previous studies. The new methodology was developed by Jeffrey Grogger and Greg Ridgeway1 and is described in detail later in this article. Grogger and Ridgeway applied the method to traffic stop data from Oakland, California, and found no evidence of profiling. Subsequently, researchers from the RAND corporation
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