How Policing Contributes to Racial Inequities

Let’s talk about systemic racism.

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Policing has a race problem.

This isn’t some hot take. Plenty of people know this already. What I want to talk about here is how and why that problem exists. I’m going to use traffic stops as the main example.

Traffic stops are one of the most common interactions that the public has with the police, and they’re often used to determine whether or not a police department is acting properly when it comes to racial profiling. This causes a bunch of issues that most people (and police) aren’t aware of.

There is plenty of research out there that shows that Black drivers are stopped more and searched (WAY) more than White drivers. () But why this happens isn’t clear from the data. All that the data shows is that the differences exist.

Seeing big differences in outcomes based on race is certainly a red flag for discriminatory behavior, but we can’t point to a single instance of discrimination in all of this data. Traffic stops and searches are made up of countless decisions on the part of an officer, and teasing apart all those decisions to identify where racial bias could be present is practically impossible.