Rachel at Ally Work gave some commentary on a real interesting report on Traffic Stop statistics that came out recently.

When you combine the data, the result do show greater scrutiny of people of color by police officers.  However, that scrutiny doesn’t always occur in the ways that we expect.  With the traffic stops, the greater scrutiny comes after the stop is made.  The data on stop and frisks need a more thorough analysis that has a national level sample and more methodological sophistication before we can make find how and why racial disparities occur.

Visit the post for further break down of the statistics and a good over view of the Bureau of Justices statistics.

I really think clearly laid out statistics like this need to be made regularly available to the public. I’m not sure why they always come out in a hard to read manner and it’s not part of the Bureau or Department of the government to actually make the statistics clear to the public. I think it would be a powerful thing for the Bureau of Justice to put out this report, have their statisticians and others analyze it and make a forward statement about how in some areas there is nothing unusual about the traffic stop statistics, but in others there is clearly still racial discrimination going on and here is what the Bureau is going to do about it. Anyways, here’s a brief break down of some of the statistics linked from an AP article on Ally Work:

Black, Hispanic and white motorists were equally likely to be pulled over by police — between 8 percent and 9 percent of each group. The slight decline in blacks pulled over — from 9.2 percent in 2002 to 8.1 percent in 2005 — was not statistically significant, Durose said, and could be the result of random differences.

The racial disparities showed up after that point:

_Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent). There were slight but statistically insignificant declines compared with the 2002 report in the percentages of blacks and Hispanics searched.

_Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police officers.

People interviewed described police hitting, kicking, pushing, grabbing, pointing a gun or spraying pepper spray at them or threatening to do so. More than four of five felt the force used was excessive, but there were no statistically significant racial disparities among the people who felt that way.