Driving While Black: Stunning Book Chronicles 20 Million Traffic Stops
Employing the theme “War On Crime”, law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. continue to initiate traffic stops on drivers for no other reason than a suspicion based on appearance. This persistent trend has eroded trust in communities while subjecting many drivers to dangerous encounters with police.
Emerging in the late 90s, a concept known as “driving while black” began garnering attention nationwide. Amidst this development, in 1999, North Carolina became the first state to codify laws around the mandatory collection of traffic data stops. This advancement of this groundbreaking legislation is largely attributed to the tireless efforts of black legislators within the state.
In their book “Suspect Citizens,” political scientists Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp, and Kelsey Shoub, Suspect Citizens provide an in-depth look at the most pervasive form of police-citizen engagement, the routine traffic stop. Using the aforementioned North Carolina database, these authors/researchers unearthed troves of information highlighting key trends on why drivers were pulled over, the outcomes of these stops, and demographic information on the drivers.
Data tied to an anonymous identification number for each officer was used to assess the time of each stop as well as the jurisdiction of the police agency. While the initial law in North Carolina only targeted the State Highway Patrol, it was later expanded to include nearly every police agency in the state. This allowed the authors to vet virtually every traffic stop that occurred in the state since 2002.
It’s here where Suspect Citizens offers the most factual account to date of the rampant disparities in how racial groups are treated during traffic stops. In Chapter 1, the authors share the following:
“ This book is about how community trust in the police can be enhanced or eroded. We conduct the most comprehensive analysis to date of traffic stops in a single state, North Carolina, in order to explore the complex relations between police and the communities they serve. By looking in detail at over 20 million traffic stops over more than a decade, we explore the patterns apparent in the data. These make clear that powerful disparities exist in how the police interact with drivers depending on their outward identities: race, gender, and age in particular.”
A key narrative here, which keeps it largely out of the media limelight, is that middle and upper-class white Americans are rarely impacted by these policing activities. The authors were able to identify four key findings that underscore this point.
The data identified stark differences in who is being targeted
Young men of color face higher levels of aggressive treatment on the part of law enforcement
These difference are not fully justified by rates of criminality
The aggressive use of traffic stops, though cited as a critical element on the war on crime, is inefficient, rarely leading to contraband arrests
Blavity had the opportunity to interview co-author Frank R Baumgartner for this article. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Baumgartner is a leading scholar of public policy and criminal justice with two previous books focused on the death penalty.
What led to your decision to co-author this book?
I was asked to volunteer and review police stop data several years ago as part of a [North Carolina] statewide task force looking into various forms of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Others looked into school-to-prison issues, drug arrests, prison populations, and so on. They asked me to look at traffic stops by providing a CD with the database on it. That was several years back. In the years since, I became very interested in delving deeper into this information.
All of this was sparked by legislation passed in North Carolina, correct?
Yes. It turned out that the law had been passed about this data collection way back in 1999, and it mandated that the state issue periodic reports, but none had ever been published. The disparities were so large, and we found them in every place we looked. So we decided we really needed to publish this book since the public authorities apparently were not interested.
What was your most surprising finding through your research for this book?
There were several. But the first was just how powerful and widespread the findings of disparate treatment are. Black drivers are twice as likely to be pulled over, and once pulled over are twice as likely to be searched. This double-whammy means that a Black person has 4 times the odds of being searched as a white. That fact was not surprising to me, of course, but I did not expect it to be quite as strong as it is, nor as universal. During every time period we looked at, virtually every police agency showed the same set of trends.
What sort of reforms would be helpful in mitigating these sorts of traffic stops based on race?
Simple reforms can work: enforce the traffic laws, stop speeders, drunk drivers, those who text while driving, those who run through stop signs, and similarly bad or unsafe drivers. But don't use the traffic law as an excuse to go on a fishing expedition. This latter approach, it turns out, is extremely inefficient - a big waste of resources. But it also gives the impression to people that they’re not full citizens, but rather, suspects.
Other recommendations?
Yes. Written forms should be used to obtain consent for a voluntary search. Informing the driver that they have the right to refuse a search if the officer does not have probable cause will typically reduce search rates, and racial disparities, dramatically.
Finally, those most affected should vote and use their political power to demand reforms. We found in cities where blacks are a large political power, by virtue of their share of voters and seats on the city council, that disparities in policing are lower. So, Vote! It does make a difference.
What overriding message are you hoping to achieve through this book?
That black and brown people are not making this stuff up. Profiling is real. It corrodes our democracy, and we should not stand for it. All of us suffer from it, even those of us (like me, a white middle-class college professor) who are not subjected to its direct impact. Governments really need to be fair in their dealings with all people in order to earn our trust. In the case of traffic stops, it is not fair, a factor that erodes our trust in government.