The relationship between local law enforcement and African American communities has been much in the news, spurred in part by cell-phone recordings of horrific police shootings and revelations about exploitive traffic fines in Ferguson, Missouri and other communities. “Driving while Black or Brown” names another problematic aspect of the relationship. Putting an end to the discrimination and disadvantage that Blacks and Latinos face when they confront police should be a national priority. Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp, and Kelsey Schoub have undertaken an analysis that can help move us in the right direction.
The goal of these authors is to show, quite precisely, how racial discrimination occurs in that most routine aspect of local policing: traffic stops and arrests. These are the occasions when people form impressions about police fairness and professionalism. Police–citizen interactions, especially when negative, also shape attitudes about the government’s commitment to fair treatment. As these authors argue, “Traffic stops are the epicenter of police-citizen interactions” (p. 5). That experience is racially skewed: whites are stopped less often and suffer fewer negative consequences than Blacks and Latinos. For middle-class white Americans, traffic stops might seem a small price to pay for safe driving conditions. For minorities, these stops tell a different story, one that casts them as suspicious residents in a white-controlled society.
The root of the problem appears to be that many traffic stops are conducted not to prevent accidents, but instead to prevent crimes. So-called investigative stops are becoming more frequent as law enforcement agencies embrace crime prevention as a core part of their work. Proactive traffic policing draws from the same theory as stop and frisk and broken windows policing. These proactive variants on traditional policing offer opportunities for racial profiling and harassing inspections of often poor and darker-skinned people whom law enforcement officers suspect of being prone to committing crime. The goal of proactive policing in traffic enforcement is to search for contraband and other evidence of illegal activity.
Supreme Court decisions that broaden the grounds on which police are entitled to stop and question residents and narrow the protection offered by the Fourth Amendment against “unreasonable searches and seizures” have accelerated this trend. The Court’s failure to appreciate the impact of pretextual stops on racial minorities was obvious in its unanimous decision in Whren v. US, a 1996 case that authorized stops for any traffic violation, even if “a reasonable officer would not have stopped the motorist” (Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806). Traffic codes, which have virtually innumerable violations, some based on subjective judgement, make pretextual stops easy, a factor discounted in Whren.
The study described in Suspect Citizens was based on an immense dataset of 20 million stops in North Carolina. The inclusion of all traffic stops throughout the state allowed the authors to dive deeply into the role race plays in traffic enforcement and to explore a variety of hypotheses. The authors contrasted investigatory stops based on pretextual or “light” violations (e.g., a nonfunctioning taillight) with stops associated with dangerous driving and accidents. The racial bias occurs in the investigatory stops. In these cases, officers are acting on a hunch about criminality from characteristics they observe. Race and, to a lesser extent, age and gender, are clearly relevant factors in officers’ suspicions.
The authors found that these suspicions are nearly always not justified. Investigatory stops are an extremely low-yield activity if the goal is to uncover serious criminality like drug trafficking. The high (and growing) numbers of stops of young Black and Latino male drivers yield few arrests for contraband. The authors are also able to show that this problem cannot be attributable to a few “bad apples.” Law enforcement agencies do differ in how often they make investigatory stops, and there are variations within agencies, but many officers are on the high side of these stops, not just a problematic few. Leadership in a law enforcement agency can make a difference, but the general pattern is an absence of interest in reducing or eliminating racial impacts.
Why might this be? The authors convincingly argue that the issue is not the individual animus of police officers toward African American and Latino drivers. If it were, the consequences of pretextual stops would be more severe than disproportionate stops and searches. The triviality of the stops is evident from the lack of arrests that occur in these cases. Rather, what seems to be at work is a tendency to suspect Black and Latino drivers, especially young males, of criminal activity, and to discount the emotional toll of frequent stops on these communities. That lack of consideration for the individual stopped is evident in common justifications for stops like “You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you get your prince.”
The data on which this study was based are publicly available. The authors benefited from a 1999 North Carolina law requiring police to record detailed data on race and gender for every traffic stop. The legislature makes that data public, but has taken no steps to analyze it (despite the law’s prescriptions). North Carolina created this massive dataset, ironically, to put an end to controversy over racial bias in traffic stops. Persistent advocacy by a few black legislators got the issue on the table. Conservative white Republican legislators joined the effort, convinced that the evidence would show no racial bias. The authors describe the controversy that brought this dataset into being to help explain why the problem of racial discrimination in traffic stops persists and gets so little political traction. Whites just do not see this as a problem because they do no experience it, and their networks often do not include its victims.
The authors offer two reforms to reduce racial bias in traffic policing: an end to investigatory stops and a requirement of written consent before a search can be undertaken. Both proposals have met with fierce resistance from police chiefs and sheriffs. Nevertheless, with some pressure from city governments and changes in police leadership, the written consent reform has been undertaken in some places. No law enforcement leaders have taken the opportunity to use the data to improve the performance of individual officers.
Suspect Citizens documents the reasons why reform is needed by exploring the consequences of overpolicing and by suggesting why reform has not been a priority in many jurisdictions. They conclude that Black political power is key to attracting attention to this issue, and that failure to address it creates serious problems of alienation from law enforcement and government. This is the part of the book that is necessarily most speculative, but it serves as a reminder of the importance of seeing overpolicing as an aspect of American racism that should be of concern to everyone.
This book is an important primer for policy makers and advocates, which does not mean that it is always an easy read. The need to lay out all the evidence in detail and to construct chapters that can be disaggregated as needed makes for some repetition and tendentiousness that students might not appreciate. The authors, however, do a good job of speaking to multiple audiences. They cite the relevant criminological, sociological, social-psychology, and political science literature appropriately. The discussion of legal precedents is apt, and their knowledge of policing practices is very helpful in creating a persuasive brief for reform.
