is very important to the issue of racial profiling, but not a dispositive one. (I’ll get back to this later) The question that has not been answered, and is vital to this discussion, is whether the actual rates of people of different races being pulled over for speeding (whether they receive a ticket or not) conforms with the actual rates of different races speeding. For that, we need more information. Fair enough.
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is a difference between speeding rates of people with differing socio-economic/ethnic/racial backgrounds. The “car culture” in this country is a very diverse one, with many factors playing into it. But that’s neither here nor there.
And doreen, speeding does indeed have an important role in racial profiling. It is important to remember that no one is ever, at least on the superficial level, pulled over simply because they are of a particular race. A pretext is necessary, and speeding is the most obvious one.
But, as I’m sure we all know, cops don’t pull over every speeder. It’s an impossibility when you look at the sheer numbers of speeders. Cops pick and choose (think about it - how many times have you been cruising at 70 and had a panic attack when you saw a cop on the side of the road. And how many of those times the cop didn’t pull out and pull you over.)
So the relationship between speeding and racial profiling is why a cop decides to pull over a particular speeder. So the relationship between the race of speeders and the race of people pulled over for speeding is an important concern.
But there is a second issue (as I promised above) - what a cop does once he’s/she’s pulled you over. This is the difference between a straight stop for speeding and a pretextual stop.
A cop can just check your llicense and registration, and give you a ticket or a warning, or a cop can ask to search your car, pull you out of the car and frisk you, etc., etc. And if cops go beyond the mere issuance of a ticket more often with blacks or other minorities, regardless of whether the rates at which minorities are pulled over conform with the rates minorities speed, we are back into a racial profiling problem.
Yes, and the general principle is important to measuring all sorts of discrimination. E.g., a statistics professor friend used to testify in cases alleging racial discrimination in employment, back in the 1970s. He would compare rates of employement by race vs. the percentage of that race in the community. Trouble is, they assumed that any difference was caused by discrimination. Actually, a host of other possibilities exist: cultural differences, education, desire for that type of work, etc.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to be sure one has fully adjusted for various differences. Just as this NJ study was criticized, any other such study would be questionable.
It’s a real step forward to formally acknowledge that differences in raw numbers might not always be the result of discrimination.
Shouldn’t post when I’m tired. What I was trying to get at was a combination of your second issue (it matters what happens after the stop ) and another point. Speeding may be the most common and obvious pretext for a stop (especially on a highway where lots of people are speeding), but there are others.And if the pretext is a total falsehood ,(I’ll get to this) and no record is kept of who is stopped but not issued a ticket,looking at the percentage of speeders and how many tickets are issued won’t necessarily reveal profiling.
The false pretext- I’ve been stopped ( sometimes after being followed for a few blocks) at least 5 times because my "brakelights were out " In each case :
1 My brakelights were working - I know because I checked
2 I didn’t get a ticket
3 No paperwork of any kind was done, so there was no record of the stop
4 I was a white woman driving in a minority neighborhood with a lot of drug activity ( Brownsville and East NY, for anyone from NYC) very early in the morning or late at night.
I don’t see any reason why the same thing couldn’t happen with speeding- being told you were stopped for speeding (even though you weren’t), the police getting an opportunity to look into your car and ask questions, and driving away without a ticket.And those stops would not show up in a comparison of speeders and tickets issued by race.