The Conversation: Motorists of color still stopped more frequently

By WENFEI XU, DAVID LEVINSON, MICHAEL SMART & NEBIYOU TILAHUN
A team of university researchers

Traffic stops by Chicago police have more than doubled over the past nine years in what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling the “new stop-and-frisk.”

Stop-and-frisk is when officers stop and search people based on “reasonable suspicion” they are involved in criminal activity. The practice has been documented to disproportionately target Black and Latino people — not only in Chicago, but across the United States.

In Chicago, stop-and-frisk has declined sharply since a 2015 reform agreement between the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department.

But traffic stops have surged, rising from fewer than 200,000 in 2016 to more than 570,000 in 2023. And much like stop-and-frisk, police disproportionately stop Black drivers, according to a study of ours examining racial bias in traffic enforcement.

Our research used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and stopped by the Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, police stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

On roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive 54% of automated camera citations, but account for about 70% of police stops. On roads where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for half of automated citations, but less than 20% of police stops.

Our research adds to other evidence that shows racial bias is a problem in traffic enforcement — a problem sometimes summarized as “driving while Black.”

The civil rights era of the 1960s was rife with law enforcement incidents targeting Black drivers. As scholar and historian Gretchen Sorin details in “Driving While Black,” the car simultaneously opened new possibilities of freedom as well as new hazards for Black people.

By the 1990s, the whole world witnessed the punishment that could await those caught driving while Black.

In 1991, a Black man named Rodney King was stopped after a high-speed chase and beaten by police in Los Angeles. The violent encounter, captured on videotape and shared on local media, became national news.

The officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which widespread unrest and violence killed more than 50, injured thousands and inflicted $1 billion in damage.

In recent years, the police killings of Daunte Wright, Tyre Nichols and other Black drivers have shown how traffic stops can escalate quickly and sometimes lethally.

All humans have biases. These biases can become dangerous when those humans are police — agents of the state who are armed and empowered to make our cities safer. Even when there’s no excessive force, disparate enforcement erodes trust.

In recent years, as national conversations around racial bias in policing have accelerated, many departments have implemented programs to establish fairer enforcement. While these initiatives appear to have an effect on officers’ attitudes, they do not seem to change the racial breakdown of stops, searches and arrests.

To reduce enforcement disparities and improve handling of traffic violations, more fundamental reforms are likely necessary. Several recent reforms focus on decriminalization and de-escalation.

Legislators in Illinois recently proposed a bill that would prohibit traffic stops solely based on noncriminal and minor offenses, such as improper vehicle registration, seat belt violations or lane usage mistakes.

Berkeley, California, is considering using trained civilians for traffic enforcement to reduce the risk of escalation. The idea is akin to how parking enforcement is done in many cities — including Chicago.

The rationale for many police traffic stops is safety, which should remain a priority. Between 2013 and 2022 in Chicago, crashes on average killed 44 pedestrians, seven bicyclists and 78 vehicle passengers each year.

In contrast, the Norwegian capital of Oslo had four traffic deaths a year between 2015 and 2019. If Chicago’s streets were as safe as Oslo’s, crashes would kill 15 people each year, not 129.

More reliance on automated traffic enforcement could improve traffic safety and transform policing as well.

Cameras can detect dangerous moving violations, such as serious speeding and running red lights, without the need for immediate police involvement. Cameras have reduced serious crashes substantially when deployed.

Over half of police stops in Chicago for 2023 were license plate, registration or equipment related.

Automating enforcement of such nonmoving violations would eliminate a major reason for police-driver interaction and free officers for more pressing needs.

From The Conversation, an online repository of lay versions of academic research findings found at theconversation.com/us. Used with permission.