Profiles in Policing

Historically, racial profiling in the United States has disproportionately affected the African American community. In the wake of the civil unrest that shook many cities during the 1960s, many domestic law enforcement agencies attempted to reduce racial tensions by diversifying police forces and implementing strict monitors to reduce profiling. However, some argue that these efforts have been unsuccessful.

In “Policing Race: The Racial Stratification of Searches in Police Traffic Stops,” a November 2012 article in Criminology, authors Jeff Rojek, Richard Rosenfeld, and Scott Decker examine how police handle searches during traffic stops and shed light on the continued presence of race-based policing.

The authors frame their examination of racial profiling through the lens of Donald Black’s theory of law, which posits that individuals of higher social status are more likely to invoke the law against those of lower social status rather than the other way around. Black also found that “police officers are influenced by their social position relative to citizens in their decisions to invoke the law.” From that implication, the authors hypothesize that the most common form of traffic stop should be white law enforcement officers on black citizens, followed by white officers on white citizens, black officers on black citizens, and finally black officers on white citizens.

The authors seek to use Black’s framework to better understand how law enforcement reacted in areas with significant racial and social stratification. They analyze data from nearly 70,000 traffic stops made by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2007. The authors chose St. Louis because of its demographics; nearly half the population is white while the other half is black, and all other minorities make up less than five percent of the population. St. Louis also has major racial disparities in economic status.

After examining the data, Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker find results consistent with their hypothesis and Donald Black’s theory. The data shows that a white officer was more than five times more likely to search a black driver during a traffic stop than a black officer was to search a white driver. White officer/white driver stops and black officer/black driver stops were similarly in line with expectations, occurring more than twice as often as black officer/white driver stops.

Taking the analysis a step further, the authors also break down St. Louis’s police districts into three groups based on the proportion of African American residents: those with “low” (average 25.7 percent), “middle” (average 71.9 percent), and “high” (average 95.9 percent) proportions. They then re-examine searches at traffic stops under this new context and find that searches in “low” areas were generally consistent with previous results. However, in both the “middle” and “high” areas the most common traffic stops were of white drivers by white officers.

Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker suggest that these results could be the result of white officers in minority communities engaging in “out-of-place” policing. While raising some questions about the possibility, the authors underscore that the data seems to show that in “a racially stratified society and racially segregated city, Blacks and Whites encountered in the ‘wrong’ places evidently provoke police suspicion.”

While emphasizing the need to replicate results with future research, the authors clearly suggest that if out-of-place policing is indeed a practice in some areas, law enforcement must work to eliminate it. By allowing the practice to persist it will only exacerbate and reinforce racial stratification.

Feature Photo: cc/MoDOT Photos