Quotes from Frank R. Baumgartner

Where these sociodemographic groups overlap is where police attention is most focused. Thus, millions of Americans have been targeted for more intensive police attention outside of the gaze or knowledge of most middle-class whites. And it has not been trivial at all. It has been humiliating, frustrating, and unfair. Beyond all that, it has been ineffective.

The math is simple, and laid out in Table 5.6. From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The "sheer numbers game" the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.

Our analysis suggests that ratcheting up the use of traffic stops as a crime fighting strategy has little positive effect on crime but dramatically negative effects on racial disparities, on alienation and trust in the minority community, and on community cooperation with the police.

Whereas 3 percent of traffic stops lead to a search, only about one-third of those searches lead to contraband. Further, only about half of those contraband hits lead to arrest, which is not surprising because when we look at the amounts of contraband found, it is typically that associated with a user, not a distributor, of the item in question.

As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, "the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers' suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit" (US DOJ 2015, 65).

Our argument is that it is not contact with the police per se that is problematic. In fact, the results of the study suggest that when the police deal with people in ways that they experience as being fair, contact promotes trust and a variety of types of desirable public behavior. Rather, it is contact that communicates suspicion and mistrust that undermines the relationship between the public and the police.

Collectively, police have a contraband hit rate of 29 percent (or 12 percent, looking only at arrest-worthy contraband).

Traffic stops rarely yield contraband, and when they do, it is in such small amounts that the most common outcome is a ticket. Just 12 percent of searches lead to the discovery of a large enough amount of contraband to merit arrest.

Taken together, NC police show some alarming tendencies, namely a propensity to search blacks at a much higher rate than whites, even as they are less likely to find contraband on blacks (at least when there is discretion involved).

This means that officers must stop many more blacks than whites before whites begin to look "out of place." If it is true that the traffic stops an officer makes reflect the racial make-up of the area in which they are patrolling, then it would seem that whites in a black area do not appear to raise the same suspicions as blacks in a white area.

Thus the major take-away from the chapter is that the problems we have documented are systemic, the result of widespread institutional standards that pressure officers, either explicitly or implicitly, to direct undue attention to minority drivers.

The fact that Hispanic drivers are less likely to have contraband does not seem to stop officers from searching them much more than white drivers.

Most important is that in almost every year Hispanics are more likely than whites to experience these types of search and less likely than whites to be found with contraband

First, there are stark differences. Second, young men of color are clearly targeted for more aggressive treatment. Third, these differences are not fully justified by differences in criminality. Fourth, the aggressive use of traffic stops as a tool to investigate possible criminal behavior, though justified as part of the war on crime, is surprisingly inefficient, rarely leading to arrests for contraband.

Altogether, fewer than 10 percent of citizen interactions with the police involve criminal investigations, and almost 60 percent involve traffic stops or accidents, with routine traffic stops by far the most common source of all police contact