By Payton Dougherty, Editorial Content Strategist
Police in the United States conduct more than 20 million traffic stops every year, making it one of the most common reasons for police contact in the country. Odds are, you’ve even experienced being the driver in a traffic stop yourself.
The commonality of this experience ends almost immediately, however: research has long established that your race can play a determinative role in an officer’s decision to pull you over, how they’ll treat you during the encounter, and the cascade of consequences that those decisions may unleash in your life. This is corroborated by dozens of assessments conducted by the Center for Policing Equity using police behavioral data from various types and sizes of law enforcement agencies around the county, which consistently reveal anti-Black disparities in who police decide to stop, search, and more.
Disparities in policing are typically examined in isolation from each other. While this is useful for quantifying the disparate outcomes of each decision, it can obscure the cumulative manner in which Black people experience them during real interactions with police. Our latest white paper, “Compounding Anti-Black Racial Disparities in Police Stops,”addresses this challenge by providing an overarching picture of how racially disparate policing decisions compound over the course of an officer-community member interaction, illustrating how each disparate decision increases the risks of harm throughout subsequent decision points in the encounter.
Black Drivers at Disproportionate Risk of Harm During Traffic Stops
Key findings reveal a sequence of racial disparities in police officers’ interactions with Black drivers compared to White drivers. Specifically, they show that police decide to stop Black drivers at disproportionately high rates, and more often do so for non-safety-related or pretextual reasons. Then, police decide to search Black drivers they’ve stopped at disproportionately high rates, and more often do so without probable cause. This may be partially driven by the stop reason: police are more likely to conduct discretionary searches at non-safety-related stops, and they more often stop Black people for these reasons.
Conducting a discretionary search is shown to substantially increase the likelihood of a use of force incident, so it should come as no surprise that Black people, who police subject to higher search rates, also experience higher use of force rates, both at vehicle stops and in general. Research has also shown that police are more likely to use force against drivers stopped for non-safety-related reasons, further demonstrating how low-level traffic enforcement fuels compounding racial disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force.
Crucially, analyses show that these disparities are not justified by any public safety needs or apparent differences in criminality among Black drivers. The kinds of low-level stops driving these disparities have historically been presented as a necessary tool for road safety and crime prevention, but data have repeatedly shown that these stops pose a lethal danger to those stopped while achieving neither of those objectives. These types of stops are often pretextual, meaning the driver is ostensibly stopped for a minor traffic infraction, but the officer’s true intent is to seek evidence of an unrelated crime for which they lack the legal standard of reasonable suspicion. This includes stops for broken tail lights, tinted windows, and other things that pose no discernable threat to public safety.
Pretextual Stops Often Do More Harm Than Good
Evidence in the latest white paper further dispels myths around the necessity of pretextual stops, showing that they can be eliminated without adversely affecting crime rates. Research featured in the paper also suggests these stops can do more harm than good for public safety. For example, surveys of young people who’ve experienced unnecessary stops have shown increased levels of self-reported criminal behavior following such stops. These types of stops have also been shown to reduce future cooperation with law enforcement, reduce engagement with beneficial institutions like education systems and the labor market, and kick off a vast array of other potential negative consequences that are only the beginning of the sequence of compounding and disparate harms in the criminal legal system.
This whole sequence begins with an officer’s decision to stop someone—and when that decision is made for no good reason, it unnecessarily puts community members’ safety and wellbeing at risk.
Despite the well-established, racially disparate costs of low-level stops, police in most jurisdictions still have tremendous latitude to use their own discretion in determining whether a driver should be pulled over. In many jurisdictions, there are even financial incentives to do so.
The problem may be great, but the science is clear: low-level, pretextual stops are not a tool for public safety, but a threat to the safety of Black people and communities.
Law enforcement and policymakers must implement evidence-informed practices that reduce the footprint of policing on traffic safety to address the disproportionate risks that low-level traffic enforcement poses to Black drivers. At a minimum, this means deprioritizing non-safety-related and pretextual stops. But ultimately, jurisdictions must redesign public safety systems in ways that reduce all forms of unnecessary police contact, free up law enforcement resources to address serious crime, and prioritize true public safety for all.
With more communities beginning to realize the benefits of reduced traffic stops, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a future with more equitable road safety systems is possible. It’s now on all of us — law enforcement, policymakers, and community members alike — to do our part in making that future a reality.