Daily Kos: 100 million traffic stops show massive racial bias in policing

Daily Kos: 100 million traffic stops show massive racial bias in policing by Laura Clawson:

There is racial bias in policing, and a team of Stanford University researchers has erased any shadow of reasonable doubt about it. (Facts can’t do much about unreasonable doubt.) The Stanford Open Policing Project data includes nearly 100 million police stops over six years from 50 state and municipal police departments, finding powerful evidence of bias not just in who gets stopped but in what happens next.

While “officers generally stop black drivers at higher rates than white drivers, and stop Hispanic drivers at similar or lower rates than whites,” there could conceivably be multiple explanations for that. But once a driver has been stopped, black and Hispanic drivers are much more likely to be ticketed, searched, and arrested than white drivers. In fact, black drivers are 20 percent more likely and Latino drivers are 30 percent more likely to be ticketed than white drivers. It doesn’t stop there, though—they’re also twice as likely to be searched as white drivers.