None of the accompanying officers intervened to stop Floyd, likely due to fear of becoming an outcast within the police department

As a result of the decriminalization of certain crimes, police officers have less reason to stop individuals, decreasing the opportunities for misconduct, and building trust in law enforcement

First, as stated in District Attorney Krasner’s memo, these reforms aim to lessen mass incarceration, which disproportionately has effected communities of color.284Second, and arguably even more important, these policies remove prosecutorial and police discretion.

The memo requires the prosecutors to (1) “decline certain charges,” such as marijuana possession or low-level prostitution, (2) reduce the level of charges from felony to misdemeanor in theft cases, (3) “divert” cases more frequently, (4) grow “re-entry programs” in Philadelphia, (5) lessen requirements in plea agreements, and (6) state the pros and cons of the suggested sentence for crimes at sentencing.

“Broken Windows policing,” a style of policing that led to “the criminalization and over-policing of communities of color” by criminalizingpublic alcohol consumption, jaywalking, spitting, loitering, trespassing, possession of marijuana,and other crimes that do not put the public in danger

The Role of the District Attorneyin Deterring Police Misconduct

Although the states primarily control police departments, there are two important roles the federal government can play in holding law enforcement accountable through state licensing

licensing bodies must have considerable power to (1) incentivize reporting of misconduct, (2)have the personnel and the powerconduct investigations of police departmentsincluding subpoena powerand (3) reprimand departments and individual police chiefs when misconduct is not reported.250Toensure officers report

Granting the oversight body the power to review, particularly when officers may not be expecting it, ensures that officers will be held accountable for misconduct, and helps to build additional trust in the community

To enhance trust in law enforcement, the state’s oversight body should implement body-camera requirements for all officers

if officers know that a third party, as opposed to a fellow officer

Furthermore, if the licensing body also has oversight of other roles within the criminal justice system, such as the hiring of correctional officers, campus safety officers, parole officers, and others, it can ensure that when a police officer is fired, he or she cannot merely re-enter law enforcement in another capacity.

Having oversight over the department grants the licensing body controlbothin establishing police licensing requirementsandinestablishing conduct worthy of decertification

236Successful licensing statutes, one scholar argues, wouldhave fourprimaryelements: (1)the licensing body has oversight over police officers andother actors within the criminal justice system; (2) the licensing body can revokelicensesand decertify police officers for a variety of types of misconduct, not just criminal convictions; (3) the licensing body should be able to both incentivize law enforcement to report misconduct and reprimand law enforcement when it fails to report misconduct, and; (4) the licensing body may impose punishments when police departments, and more specifically, chiefs of police departments,fail to report misconduct

This Article argues that certification statutes must be strong enough to hold police officers accountable and ensure that all misconduct, not just misconduct egregious enough to be charged in court, is brought to the review of third-parties

Meaningful Licensing & Decertification Statutes Can Hold Police Accountable

Reforms must focus on ensuring accountability, trust,and deterrence.225There need to be neutral,speedy, adjudication of police malfeasance. In addition,there needs to be power to punish

unbiased reviewers

Officers should not be able to turn off body-cameras without facing repercussions, and the public and oversight body should be able to access the body-camera footage without delays

Without building trust between the Black community and law enforcement,reform efforts are meaningless; the best reforms, therefore, hold police accountable and demonstrate “fair process” to the public

REFORMS THAT DETER

Furthermore, many police departments allow officers who have received multiple complaints to serve as trainers or mentors fornew recruits

Germany’s, or increasing de-escalation, racial bias, and mental health training, would improve U.S. police departments

Due to the lack of training in this area, many families of those with mental illness lack trust in the police, and do not feel comfortable calling 911 in crisis situations

In addition, few police training regimens include implicit bias training, andin those that do, the training is extremely short

hus, police officers enter the workforce prepared to use deadly force

de-escalation practicesreceived only eight hours of attention during training

barbers in North Carolina must complete 1,528 hours

n the United States, however, training may take only twenty-one weeks, with an average of 672 basic training hours to becomea police officer.

Recruiting a diverse workforce of individuals

Thus, one possible incremental reform for U.S. law enforcement is recruiting more women, who are less likely to use force than male officers

majority white and male

COMMONLY CITED REFORM TACTICS:WHY THEY FAIL TO CHANGE POLICE PRACTICES &CULTURE

Part IV

Reforms range from banning chokeholds to completely dismantling and defunding American police departments

Black Codes

how racism intersects with policing

Police departments were born to maintain control over Black Americans, andremnants of this initial practice remain in policing today.

white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto...White institutionscreated it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

J.D. Candidate 2021 and teaching assistant for Introduction to Criminal Justice, Boston College Law School.

why has nothing changed

this Articledoes not provide a cure for systemic racism

It runs through every aspect of society, from healthcare to education.

pervasive

ROBERT M. BLOOM *NINA LABOVICH **

THE CHALLENGE OF DETERRING BAD POLICE BEHAVIOR: IMPLEMENTING REFORMS THAT HOLD POLICE ACCOUNTABLE

Regardless of whether such information increases the efficiency of searches, officers are legally barred from using race to inform search decisions outside of circumscribed situations (for example, when acting on specific and reliable suspect descriptions that include race among other factors).

If, for example, officers have a lower threshold for searching black drivers than white drivers, that would indicate that they are willing to search black drivers on the basis of less evidence than for white drivers—and we would conclude that black drivers are being discriminated against. In the economics literature, this type of behaviour is often called taste-based discrimination24 as opposed to statistical discrimination40,41, in which officers might use a driver’s race to improve their estimate that the driver is carrying contraband.

Analysing nearly 100 million traffic stops across the country, we have worked to quantify the often complex relationship between race and policing in the United States

We also hope that police departments start to analyse their data regularly and report the results of their findings. Such analyses might include estimates of stop, search and hit rates stratified by race, age, gender and location; distribution of stop reasons by race; and trends over time

To quantify and correct for this issue, police departments might regularly audit their data, possibly by comparing an officer’s perception of race to a third party’s judgement based on driver’s licence photos for a random sample of stopped drivers.

For example, the recorded race of the driver is often based on the officer’s perception rather than a driver’s self-categorization.

Equally important to data collection is ensuring the integrity of the recorded information. We frequently encountered missing values and errors in the data (for example, implausible values for a driver’s age and invalid racial categorizations). Automated procedures can be put in place to help detect and correct such problems.

If, for example, officers disproportionately patrol black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, the downstream effects can be injurious even if individual stop decisions are not directly affected by the colour of one’s skin. Similarly, enforcement of minor traffic violations, like broken tail lights—even if conducted uniformly and without animus—can place heavy burdens on black and Hispanic drivers without improving public safety17.

Because black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be searched before legalization, the policy change reduced the absolute gap in search rates between race groups; however, the relative gap persisted, with black and Hispanic drivers still more likely to be searched than white drivers post-legalization.

In Fig. 3 (top row), we plot hit rates by race and location for the states (left) and for the cities (right) for which we have the necessary information. Across jurisdictions, we consistently found that searches of Hispanic drivers were less successful than those of white drivers. However, searches of white and black drivers had more comparable hit rates. The outcome test thus indicates that search decisions may be biased against Hispanic drivers, but the evidence is more ambiguous for black drivers. Aggregating across state patrol stops, contraband was found in 32.0% (95% CI 31.6–32.4%) of searches of white drivers compared to 24.3% (95% CI 23.5–25.2%) of searches of Hispanic drivers and 29.4% (95% CI 28.7–30.0%) of searches of black drivers. In particular, the gap in hit rates between white and Hispanic drivers was 7.6% (95% CI 6.7–8.6%, P < 0.001), and the gap in hit rates between white and black drivers was 2.6% (95% CI 1.9–3.4%, P < 0.001). Similarly, aggregating across municipal police departments, contraband was found in 18.2% (95% CI 17.8–18.7%) of searches of white drivers compared to 11.0% (95% CI 10.6–11.5%) of searches of Hispanic drivers and 13.9% (95% CI 13.7–14.2%) of searches of black drivers. In this case, the gap in hit rates between white and Hispanic drivers was 7.2% (95% CI 6.6–7.8%, P < 0.001) and the gap in hit rates between white and black drivers was 4.3% (95% CI 3.8–4.8%, P < 0.001). These numbers all indicate unweighted averages across our cities and states, respectively.

Becker argued that even if minority drivers are more likely to carry contraband, in the absence of discrimination, searched minorities should still be found to have contraband at the same rate as searched whites. If searches of minorities are successful less often than searches of whites, it suggests that officers are applying a double standard, searching minorities on the basis of less evidence.

In the eight state patrol agencies we consider, search rates were 4.3% (95% CI 4.2–4.4%) for black drivers, 4.1% (95% CI 4.0–4.1%) for Hispanic drivers and 1.9% (95% CI 1.9–1.9%) for white drivers. In particular, the gap in search rates between black and white drivers was 2.4% (95% CI 2.3–2.5%, P < 0.001) and the gap in search rates between Hispanic and white drivers was 2.2% (95% CI 2.1–2.2%, P < 0.001). Similarly, in the six municipal police departments we consider, the search rates were 9.5% (95% CI 9.4–9.6%) for black drivers, 7.2% (95% CI 7.0–7.3%) for Hispanic drivers and 3.9% (95% CI 3.8–3.9%) for white drivers. The gap in municipal search rates between black and white drivers was 5.6% (95% CI 5.5–5.7%, P <0.001) and the gap in search rates between Hispanic and white drivers was 3.3% (95% CI 3.1–3.5%, P <0.001). As above, these numbers are unweighted average search rates across our states and cities, respectively.

Among stopped drivers, we found that black and Hispanic individuals were, on average, searched more often than white individuals. However, as with differences in stop rates, the disparities we see in search rates are not necessarily the product of discrimination. Black and Hispanic drivers might, hypothetically, carry contraband at higher rates than white drivers, and so elevated search rates may result from routine police work even if no racial bias were present.

After stopping a driver, officers may carry out a search of the driver or vehicle if they suspect more serious criminal activity.

For example, if black drivers, hypothetically, spend more time on the road than white drivers, that could explain the higher stop rates we see for the former, even in the absence of discrimination. Moreover, drivers may not live in the jurisdictions where they were stopped, further complicating the interpretation of population benchmarks.

We note that these results are consistent with self-reported stop rates by white, black and Hispanic drivers who participated in the national PPCS1.

For Hispanic drivers, however, we found that stop rates were lower than for white drivers: 0.05 for stops conducted by state patrol (compared to 0.07 for white drivers) and 0.09 for those conducted by municipal police departments (compared to 0.14 for white drivers).

In particular, among state patrol stops, the annual per-capita stop rate for black drivers was 0.10 compared to 0.07 for white drivers; and among municipal police stops, the annual per-capita stop rate for black drivers was 0.20 compared to 0.14 for white drivers

idiosyncratic formats

Our primary dataset thus consists of approximately 95 million stops from 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police departments, as shown in Fig. 1 and described in more detail in Supplementary Table 2.

For consistency in our analysis, we further restrict to stops occurring in 2011–2018, as many jurisdictions did not provide data on earlier stops.

In the process of collecting and analysing millions of traffic stop records across the country, we encountered many logistical and statistical challenges. Based on these experiences, we conclude by offering suggestions to improve data collection, analysis and reporting by law enforcement agencies.

Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that legalization reduced both search rates and misdemeanour rates for drug offences for white, black and Hispanic drivers—though a gap in search thresholds persists.

Applied to our data, the threshold test indicates that black and Hispanic drivers were searched on the basis of less evidence than white drivers, both on the subset of searches carried out by state patrol agencies and on those carried out by municipal police departments.

The threshold test incorporates both the rate at which searches occur, as well as the success rate of those searches, to infer the standard of evidence applied when determining whom to search. This approach builds on traditional outcome analysis23,24, in which a lower search success rate for one group relative to another is seen as evidence of bias against that group, as it suggests that a lower evidentiary bar was applied when making search decisions.

If black drivers comprise a smaller share of stopped drivers when it is dark and accordingly difficult to determine a driver’s race, that suggests black drivers were stopped during daylight hours in part because of their race. In both state patrol and municipal police stops, we find that black drivers comprise a smaller proportion of drivers stopped after sunset, suggestive of discrimination in stop decisions.

This test is based on a simple observation: because the sun sets at different times throughout the year, one can examine the racial composition of stopped drivers as a function of sunlight while controlling for time of day.

While useful, these datasets provide only a partial picture. For example, there is concern that the PPCS, like nearly all surveys, suffers from selection bias and recall errors. Data released directly by police departments are potentially more complete but are available only for select agencies, are typically limited in what is reported and are inconsistent across jurisdictions.

More than 20 million Americans are stopped each year for traffic violations, making this one of the most common ways in which the public interacts with the police

We found that black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race, suggesting bias in stop decisions.

We assessed racial disparities in policing in the United States by compiling and analysing a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the country.

As my son gets older, I’ll probably have to give him some version of “the talk” that black parents give their sons about dealing with police.

collusive

Black men are the principal beneficiaries of policing; they also bear its highest costs