Penn Live: Amid policing backlash, Pa. State Police struggles to evolve: ‘This is a crisis’

February 23 2021

From the article: "Spotlight PA obtained state police traffic stop data that had been gathered and analyzed before the department stopped collecting those stats back in 2010.

The statistics, which had been analyzed for PSP by the University of Cincinnati, showed troopers were roughly two to three times more likely to search Black or Hispanic drivers than white drivers after pulling them over. Yet, the greater percentage of searches of people of color yielded a far lower success rate for finding contraband, compared to the less frequent but more fruitful searches of white drivers.

Chris Burbank, who left 25 years as a cop and police chief behind to become a national reform advocate for the Center for Policing Equity in New York, told PennLive this PSP data suggests a classic case of systematic police bias.

In short, Burbank says many of the problems of policing inequity are rooted in the “practices and procedures” of the institutions, not necessarily the biases of individual officers..."

By John Luciew

Continue reading the article on Penn Live.