This post was originally published on Defender Network
By Aswad Walker
What do Tyre Nichols, Patrick Lyoya, Daunte Wright, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose and countless others have in common? A police traffic stop ended in their death. Of the names listed, only Castile, a licensed gun owner, had a weapon; a fact that he informed the officer of when asked, yet less than 1.7 seconds later he was shot and killed.
The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that Blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when ‘a veil of darkness’ masks their race.
TOM AATE, STANFORD NEWS
Black people need not bungee jump or skydive to experience the “exhilaration” of danger. Driving While Black has become for African Americans, an extreme sport.
Texas Black Drivers Targeted
And it all stems from police targeting Black drivers, stopping them at far greater rates than any others – stops that may not end in death, but account for the over-arresting of Blacks in proportion to their numbers.
A report from the Texas Civil Rights Project analyzed 2022 traffic stop data from the Houston Police Department and found that police pulled over 81,026 people specifically for non-moving traffic violations, like driving with an expired registration sticker.
According to the report, “Houston’s Black drivers accounted for nearly 42% of these stops — despite the fact that about 23% of Houston’s population is Black, according to census data.”
For context, of HPD traffic stops, Hispanic drivers made up about 31% while white drivers accounted for about 25%.
Additionally, the report found that Black drivers made up nearly 60% of the 2,733 arrests that occurred after these stops while white and Hispanic drivers accounted for roughly 19% each.
Black Drivers Targeted Nationally
And this disturbing reality is national.
Encounters with police during traffic stops, including minor infractions, disproportionately harm people of color, according to data collected by Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group, which argues that armed police should not be involved in many of these cases.
Per 2018 statistics, roughly 10% of the nearly 1,100 people killed by police each year involve traffic violations, the group found.
The Investigative Project on Race and Equity and WBEZ Chicago are launching a three-part investigation of the convergence of race and traffic stops in Illinois.
In 2003, Illinois passed a measure sponsored by then-state Sen. Barack Obama to gather details of every police stop in the state, including the driver’s race or ethnicity. On the 20th anniversary of that law’s passage, the Investigative Project and WBEZ assembled and analyzed 42.5 million records of traffic stop data that were collected under the law, covering more than 1,000 jurisdictions across Illinois.
Here’s what they found:
- In the last two years, stops involving Black drivers have topped 30% of all traffic stops statewide, up from 17.5% in 2004, the first year data was released;
- In Chicago, where Black, white, and Latino populations* are roughly equal, traffic stops of Black drivers in 2022 were more than four times that of whites and more than twice that of Latinos;
- Beyond Chicago’s city limits, traffic stops also disproportionately affect Black drivers. Last year traffic stops involving Black drivers made up 21% of all traffic stops throughout Illinois (excluding Chicago); and
- The percentage of Black drivers stopped by police continues to rise, unabated. A record number of law enforcement agencies are ignoring the law. And the state seems incapable of reversing the tide.
“Our analysis and reporting demonstrates that Illinois and the Chicago area are still grappling with the consequences of systemic racism,” said Laura Washington, a founding board member of the Investigative Project.
But Illinois is far from alone. This is a national issue.
According to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 6% of Black and Hispanic Americans pulled over for traffic stops were searched or arrested, the most of any other groups. Americans in “all other” racial categories were searched or arrested 4% of the time.
Police Ticketing By the Numbers
40% Of Whites
45% Of Blacks
50% Of Hispanics
Police Warnings By the Numbers
47% Whites
36% Hispanics
34% Blacks
Threat or Use of Excessive Force by Police
63% Blacks
54%Hispanics
44% Whites (however, their definition of “excessive force often included merely being pulled over by police)
(source: usafacts.org)
In Houston, there’s a movement to pass laws to confront this inequity of racially targeted traffic stops.
The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) report recommends city officials “pass an ordinance that prohibits police from conducting non-safety traffic stops,” and therefore focus on moving traffic violations like speeding and drunk driving.
“The ordinance would only allow police to focus on what causes road fatalities, to actually address what makes the road dangerous for all of us,” said Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator for TCRP’s Criminal Injustice Program.
Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias, and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities.
NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR RESEARCHERS
For Blacks, beyond traffic stops all too often proving to be fatal or leading to arrest rates that far surpass arrest numbers for other races, there’s the outsized economic impact of highly racialized traffic stops.
In 2022, vehicle traffic violations in Houston amounted to over $19 million in fines and fees, according to the TCRP report. Failure to display registration tags, the most collected fine, extracted payments of over $500,000.
“We oppose these types of fines and fees because we already know people are struggling because inflation has gone up so much. Oftentimes, they just have to pay off these fines and fees, they don’t get their car fixed, and this vicious cycle of poverty just continues,” said Rivera.
“Police are currently going out and patrolling to siphon wealth, to injure individual drivers, and increase our incarceration,” Rivera said, whose organization is pushing for a voucher program to help low-income drivers get their vehicles up to code.
One of the most exhaustive studies on the issue, led by Stanford University, found that after analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.” Their conclusion regarding reducing or deterring racially motivated police traffic stops was less a recommendation and more of an observed reality.
“Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias, and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities,” the researchers write in the May 4th issue of “Nature Human Behaviour.” But researchers concluded that Blacks’ best defense against being racially targeted for a traffic stop was to literally hide from police the fact that they are Black motorists.
“The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that Blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when ‘a veil of darkness’ masks their race,” wrote Tom Aate for the Stanford News.
