By The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC)

Race discrimination has been a significant issue in policing for many years. It underpins the creation of our predecessor, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) following Sir William Macpherson’s inquiry and subsequent report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. By ensuring that serious complaints and conduct matters are handled impartially and thoroughly, we play a vital role in driving improvements in policing through learning and accountability. However, tackling race discrimination in policing is a complex and highly sensitive issue. The historical backdrop of racial bias and discrimination in policing has led to deep seated mistrust between affected communities and the police, which becomes prominent during critical moments in policing. The murder of George Floyd by a US police officer and the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 served as a catalyst, sparking greater scrutiny of policing in England and Wales. We repeatedly hear through our engagement work that Black communities in particular feel over-policed as suspects and under-protected as victims. This is attributed to a perception of ongoing race discrimination, evidenced by our engagement with communities and stakeholders. Disproportionate use of police powers, such as stop and search and use of force, contribute to this ongoing perception, particularly when no explanation can be provided for the racial disparities that exist. These disparities, reported each year without a definitive explanation, suggest the potential presence of underlying systemic issues and structural inequalities. While we recognise that policing has taken meaningful steps towards ensuring that all communities receive fair and impartial treatment, there are still considerable issues involving race within policing. Our findings, along with data on racial disparities and feedback from both communities and stakeholders, provides clear evidence and there is broad consensus both within policing and wider society that these systemic problems still exist. However, there is a reluctance in some quarters to use the phrase ‘institutional racism’. Macpherson was clear on what institutional racism is - a collective failure to provide an appropriate professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. We think it is important that those communities who are most affected by these systemic issues should be listened to and they are clear: language matters. The aim of this work is not to make political statements, brand all police officers as racist or disregard the valuable progress that has been made. This is about being being clear that a problem still exists and to talk about it in a way that resonates with those communities most affected, so they feel heard and confident to work with the police to continue to make progress. It is only by working with those communities that policing can hope to achieve Macpherson’s aim to eliminate racist prejudice and disadvantage and to demonstrate fairness in all aspects of policing. This report brings together our thematic work to explore, challenge and address race discrimination in policing. Alongside this report we have published revisions to the guidelines for handling allegations of discrimination, that were originally created by the IPCC, and a toolkit for police complaint handlers. We are sharing the learning from our work to help forces take action to rebuild trust and confidence in policing and the complaints system. Our earlier publications - focusing on Taser, stop and search and complaint handling - in conjunction with our independent investigations and reviews, form part of our ongoing effort to help policing drive improvements in this longstanding area of concern.

Sale, UK: The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), 2024. 64p.

By Marleen Stelter,  Iniobong Essien, Carsten Sander, and Juliane Degner

Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S. counties and county-level measures of racial bias from more than 2 million online respondents. Compared with their population share in county demographics, Black drivers were stopped at disproportionate rates in the majority of counties. Crucially, disproportionate stopping of Black drivers was higher in counties with higher levels of racial prejudice by White residents (rs = .07-.36). Furthermore, county-level aggregates of White people's threat-related stereotypes were less consistent in predicting disproportionate stopping (rs = .00-.19). These observed relationships between regional-level bias and racial disparities in policing highlight the importance of the context in which police operate.

Psychological Science Volume 33, Issue 4Apr 2022 Pages 483-668

By Runnymede Trust

Summary ● New Home Office data and a government consultation has enabled the Runnymede Trust to explore the use of strip search by the police, and its impact on people of colour in the UK. ● Black people are subject to disproportionate rates of strip search across all police forces in England and Wales: ○ Black children are 6.5 times more likely than white children, and Black adults 4.7 times more likely than white adults, to be strip searched by police. ○ In London, Black children are 5.3 times more likely than white children, and Black adults 3.5 times more likely than white adults, to be strip searched by police. ○ Nearly half (47.7 per cent) of strip searches carried out on children in London are on Black children. ● The Metropolitan Police conducted around a third of strip searches in England and Wales in the year to March 2023. ● Evidence illustrates the disproportionate, racialised harm caused by strip searches. ● Instead of using heavy police powers such as strip search, and in the context of wider punitive policing and curtailment of rights, the Runnymede Trust calls for a societal reorientation to address the root causes of criminalised behaviour, to actually prevent harm.

London: The Runnymede Trust, 2024. 10p.

By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Alexis D. Campbell

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on 3933 killings to examine this intersection of race and reasonableness in police killings. First, we describe the objective circumstances and interactions of police killings and map those event characteristics to the elements of reasonableness articulated in case law. Second, we assess whether inherently vague constitutional regulation of lethal force is applied differently by officers depending on the civilian’s race, giving rise to a disproportionate rate of deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. We then assess the prospects for remediation of racialized police killings by testing the effects of an existing evidence-based training curricula designed to reduce police use of deadly force towards persons experiencing mental illness. We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable. Police killings of Latinx civilians are higher compared to whites and other racial or ethnic groups in some but not all circumstances. We find no evidence that enhanced police training focused on mental health crises can reduce the incidence of fatal police shootings of persons in mental health crisis or racial and ethnic disparities generally in police killings. Our findings suggest that the standards in constitutional case law fail to anticipate the circumstances of fatal police shootings and are therefore seemingly irrelevant in preventing racial disparities in police fatal police shootings. In light of this constitutional landscape, we argue that the ineffectiveness of enhanced police training to reduce shootings overall and racial disparity within these shootings may reflect the absence of race-specific components in their curricula. We suggest that the addition of training components that specifically address the role of race in officers’ perceptions of risk and their decision-making in potentially dangerous interactions with citizens may remediate both the incidence of police shootings and their apparent racial and ethnic disparity.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:951 2020.

By Susan Olzak

An underlying premise of democratic politics is that protest can be an effective form of civic engagement that shapes policy changes desired by marginalized groups. But it is not certain that this premise holds up under scrutiny. This paper presents a three-part argument that protest (a) signals the salience of a movements’ focal issue and expands awareness that an issue is a social problem requiring a solution, (b) empowers residents in disadvantaged communities and raises a sense of community cohesion, which together (c) raise costs and exert pressure on elites to make concessions. The empirical analysis examines the likelihood that a city will establish a Civilian Review Board (CRB). It then compares the effects of protest and CRB presence on counts of officer-involved fatalities by race and ethnicity. Two main conjectures about the effect of protest are supported: Cities with more protest against police brutality are significantly more likely to establish a CRB, and protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites). But the establishment of CRBs does not reduce fatalities, as some have hoped. Nonetheless, mobilizing against police brutality matters, even in the absence of civilian review boards.

American Sociological Review. 86(6): 2021.

By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Amanda B. Geller

Following Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike by the state police from 2005– 2007, the final months of the Consent Decree. Specifically, we exploit heterogeneity of officer and driver race to identify disparities in the probability that stops lead to a search. We assume a crime-minimizing or welfarist rationale for stops, under which race-neutral factors are equally likely to motivate stops, regardless of driver or passenger race. We also test a Fairness Presumption by comparing search patterns between driver-officer pairs where the driver and officer are different races, and a set of race-neutral benchmarks where the driver and officer are the same race. Results of fixed effects logistic regressions show that Black and Hispanic drivers, when stopped, are more than twice as likely as White drivers to be searched, regardless of officer race. The results also suggest that search patterns vary significantly by officer race: Black officers are less likely to conduct a search in the course of a stop than are White drivers. We also see significant interactions between the race of officers and that of the drivers they stop: Black drivers are significantly more likely to be searched by White officers than they are by Black officers; on the other hand, Hispanic drivers are significantly less likely to be searched by either Black or White officers than they are by Hispanic officers. Racial disparities in the selection of stopped drivers for search and in the rates of seizure of contraband suggest that despite institutional reforms under the Consent Decree in management and professionalization of patrol officers, there were no tangible gains in distributional equity. We review the design of the Consent Decree and the accompanying oversight mechanisms to identify structural weaknesses in external monitoring and institutional design in the oversight of the State Police that compromised the pursuit of equality goals.

J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 16 (2020). Available at:

By Jesse Jannetta, Sino Esthappan, Jocelyn Fontaine, Mathew Lynch , and Nancy G. LaVigne

Many communities throughout the United States that face high levels of crime and concentrated disadvantage—particularly communities of color—also struggle with high levels of mistrust in the police and strained police-community relations. Recognizing that a lack of legitimacy and community trust in policing was a serious and persistent problem with deep historical roots, and that addressing that problem required a wellresourced, multidimensional approach combining proven practices with new tools and approaches, the US Department of Justice launched the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. Led by John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC), and in partnership with the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), Yale Law School (YLS), and the Urban Institute, the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice (National Initiative) brought together practitioners and researchers to deliver a suite of interventions focused on law enforcement and community members in six cities: Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Worth, Texas; Gary, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Stockton, California. Core National Initiative interventions included (1) training and technical assistance for police officers on engaging with residents in a procedurally just manner, (2) trainings that encouraged officers to understand and mitigate implicit biases, (3) developing model police department policies and identifying key changes to extant policies, and (4) reconciliation discussions, during which police officers and community members had authentic conversations to acknowledge historic tensions, harms, and misconceptions and to repair relationships. The Urban Institute evaluated the National Initiative’s implementation and impact to inform potential replications and/or modifications of the initiative’s components, and to guide future research on police efforts to build community trust. The evaluation focuses on National Initiative activities occurring from January 2015 through December 2018. Researchers collected the following qualitative and quantitative data to support the evaluation: ◼ monthly teleconferences among members of the National Initiative implementation team that included partners from CPE, NNSC, and YLS ◼ publicly available information and media coverage of the National Initiative and issues pertaining to police-community relations in the pilot sites ◼ fieldwork that included observations of National Initiative activities and interactions between National Initiative partners and site stakeholders ◼ routine teleconferences with site coordinators, police chiefs, and other stakeholders ◼ documents provided by the sites and National Initiative partners ◼ semistructured interviews with police and community stakeholders in each site ◼ learning assessment surveys of officers receiving National Initiative trainings in each site ◼ surveys of residents in areas with high levels of concentrated crime and poverty/disadvantage in each site The implementation evaluation focused specifically on the successes and challenges of the collaboration among the National Initiative partners, participating police departments, and communities.

Washington, Urban Institute, 2019. 112p.

By Yvon Dandurand, Paul Maxim and Darryl Plecas

Strained police relations with visible minorities are reflected in the fact that these minorities are much less likely than other citizens to view the police as legitimate, fair, or trustworthy, or to report crime to the police. Police in and outside of Canada have long understood the importance of improving their relationship with minorities, and in this regard, they have undertaken multiple initiatives intended to improve minority-police relations. Considerable resources and energy were devoted to trying to enhance police relationships with various visible minority groups. These efforts have included extensive outreach initiatives, force-wide sensitivity training for police officers, substantial recruitment and promotion of minorities, and policy changes relating to police practices. Have those efforts made any significant difference in how visible minorities view the police? This study was undertaken as a step toward understanding how the relationship between police services and their host communities has evolved over the years. It examined the extent to which police efforts aimed at improving police-minority relations over the past 20 years have improved perceptions of the police among visible minority groups in Canada (with special attention to British Columbia). More specifically, the study examined the degree to which attitudes of visible minorities over that 20-year period between 1999 and 2019 can be distinguished from those of the overall population in Canada and British Columbia – with special attention to the matter of crime victims’ contacts with police. The core analysis for this study involved a comparison of data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) panels on Canadians' Safety (Victimization) conducted in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019. The findings of the analysis tell a simple story. The GSS national data collected over a period of twenty years do not show significant improvements in how visible minorities in British Columbia and in Canada perceive the police. Visible minorities hold more negative views of police behaviour than non-minorities. Minorities are less likely than non-minorities to agree that police treat people fairly or do a good job in approaching people. Since the turn of the century, minorities’ views of police behaviour and fairness have generally worsened. Notably, by 2019 those views had become more negative than at any time in the previous twenty years. By then, survey results indicated that less than half of visible minorities agreed that police treat people fairly and do a good job in the way they approach people.

Vancouver, BC: International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, 2022.62p.

By The City of Dallas,

A three-year study released Thursday from the Dallas Office of Community Police Oversight looked at low-level offense arrests and showed there were disparities in those types of arrests for Black people compared to the city's Black population. The study from the oversight office looked at public data to analyze low-level arrests in Dallas and shared recommendations to lessen the impact of misdemeanor enforcement on the community, police department and city resources, the report said. Most low-level custodial arrests during the three-year study period were public intoxication, possession of marijuana, and criminal trespass, the report said. The report outlined how Black residents are more often arrested for low-level offenses like public intoxication, low-level drug-related arrests, disorderly conduct and criminal trespass which the report claims "are not a public safety threat." It also recommended that the Dallas Police Department should officially de-prioritize low-level arrests in their policy, including marijuana, possession, public intoxication and criminal trespass arrests when the offense doesn't involve a felony charge or Class A or Class B offense.

Office of Community Police Oversight

By The Leadership Conference Education Fund, et al.

In 2021, The Leadership Conference Education Fund (The Education Fund), in partnership with the City of Dallas Office of Community Police Oversight (OCPO), released a report on misdemeanor arrests by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) titled “Public Safety in Dallas: An Analysis of Racial Disparities in Low-Level Arrests.”1 That report highlighted the disproportionate enforcement of misdemeanor offenses on Black and Brown residents. Since the publication of that report, there have been encouraging steps taken by DPD to decriminalize misdemeanor marijuana possession based on the report’s recommendation on low-level misdemeanor enforcement.2 As of April 2021, DPD introduced a change to their internal General Orders, 313.05, which states that given the right conditions (which include no intent to distribute, no companion charges besides a warrant hold, or there is a companion felony drug charge)3 DPD should no longer arrest or cite an individual with possession of marijuana indicative of personal use, which is considered 2 ounces or less. As a follow-up to the initial report, The Education Fund has once again partnered with a group of engaged advocates in Dallas to develop this report. This new publication reviews arrest data from 2018 through 2022 and provides an analysis of the impact of DPD’s instituted general order, which discontinues most arrests of marijuana possession of 2 ounces or less. Like the first report, this one also provides an analysis of other misdemeanor arrests to identify opportunities to minimize police interaction for misdemeanor nonviolent offenses, continue decriminalization of misdemeanor offenses, and eliminate disproportionate police arrests of residents of color by the Dallas Police Department. These insights are useful in order to adjust laws, practices, and procedures to align with a more fair and equitable public safety system in Dallas.

Dallas: Office of Community Police Oversight, 2023. 40p.

Katie Blum and. Jill Paperno

In recent years our country has faced a racial reckoning. One of the areas of focus has been racial bias in policing. In the following pages we will address the law enforcement practice of pretext stops – stopping individuals for a reason that may not be lawful but using a low-level traffic or other violation to justify the stop. The following report is our working draft of what will later be released as a comprehensive review of pretext stops in New York. In the coming months, Empire Justice Center will be gathering more information and feedback that will be incorporated into later reports. In Section III, the Introduction to this Report, we recognize that of the approximately 1,000 deaths of civilians during police-civilian encounters each year, approximately 10% occur during low-level traffic stops. We explain what pretext stops are, and how they came to be an integral part of modern policing. We preview the harm caused by pretext stops, further discussed in Section VII. In Section IV, Racial Bias and the Data, we review information gleaned from numerous studies, as well as two books – Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles Epp, Donald Haider and Steven Maynard-Moody, and Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race, by Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp and Kelsey Shoub. These sources demonstrate that pretext stops are executed far more frequently on People of Color, with most studies focusing on Black and white drivers. Additionally, once stopped, Black drivers are more likely to be searched than white drivers. In Section V, The Law and Pretext Stops, we explain the cases that have led to the conclusion that absent proof of discriminatory intent on the part of a law enforcement officer, a high bar to reach, pretext stops are lawful. In Section VI, The Community Safety Question, we address findings that pretext stops provide minimal enhancement of community safety, reviewing studies that have addressed the frequency of seizure of contraband, as well as arrests and charges of individuals stopped. In Section VII, The Harms Caused by Pretext Stops, we consider whether these minimal community safety benefits are worth the many harms caused by pretext stops – racial disparities in how policing occurs, civilian deaths, officer deaths, and the resulting lack of trust in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. In Section VIII, Pretext Stops in Rochester, N.Y., we focus on the types of offenses that are the basis for some pretext stops in Rochester, New York, a city that has faced rising tension and civilian opposition to policing in recent years, and the racial disparities as well as geographic disparities in where these stops occur. We also review some of the statements and implicit recognition of racial disparities in policing by community leaders who have considered pretext stops.

Albany, NY: Empire Justice Center, 2023. 71p.

By Anne Nassauer

Officer-involved shootings (OIS) of people of color concern fundamental societal issues, including race, violence, and policing. While scholars have gathered extensive insights on contextual circumstances of OIS, the unfolding of encounters still remains a black box, and research is still debating whether racialized biases actually matter for shootings. To study this question, this article discusses findings from an in-depth analysis of real life OIS as they unfold. It triangulates video footage with document data to analyze the role of racial biases and situational interaction in shootings. It compares police shootings of black and white citizens, as well as a police-citizen encounter that did not end in a shooting. Findings suggest two intertwined processes of dehumanization contribute to the shootings of black citizens, one operating on the cultural and one on the situational level. The article contributes to research on race and racism, violence, police use of lethal force, and sociological theory.     

   Ethnic and Racial Studies , 2023.

By The Chicago’s Use of Force Community Working Group 

 This Report from community representatives of Chicago’s Use of Force Community Working Group offers our feedback on the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) training on de-escalation and the use of force. The Working Group was first convened in the summer of 2020 in response to the requirements of the federal civil rights Consent Decree designed to bring an end to the CPD’s pattern of police brutality and racial discrimination. Over the course of two years, the Working Group persuaded the CPD to make transformative changes to its policies governing police use of force. Last fall, we issued a Public Report on CPD’s new policies, including areas still in need of change. The new policies, if implemented and enforced on the ground, have the potential to dramatically reduce unnecessary CPD violence and improve public safety. The recent murder of Tyre Nichols by members of the Memphis Police Department serves as a stark reminder of all that is at stake in Chicago. CPD’s pattern of civil rights violations, which led to the Consent Decree, persist because of a culture of violence, racism, and denial similar to the police culture that enabled officers in Memphis to believe that they could beat and kill Mr. Nichols with impunity. … 

Chicago: The Working Group, 2023. 24p.

By Elizabeth Luh  

  Biased highway troopers may intentionally misreport the race of the stopped motorists in order to evade detection. I develop a new model of traffic stops that highlights the incentive for biased troopers to misreport their failed minority searches as White. Applying my model to the universe of highway searches in Texas from 2010–2015, I find evidence of widespread bias that varies substantially across troopers. Furthermore, misreporting increased the Hispanic search success rate by 17%. When misreporting became more difficult due to public scrutiny, misreporting troopers faced worse labor outcomes. This suggests an important role for increased accountability in data collection by law enforcement agents.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 54p.

By Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito

This article from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America estimates the variation in the risk of being killed by police use of force in the U.S. across racial groups. The authors found that risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for men and women of all racial groups. Black men and women, as well as American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men have a much higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than their white counterparts. The highest risk, however, was among Black men who face a one in 1000 chance of being killed by police over their lifetime. Presently, police violence is the leading cause of death for young Black men in the United States.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2019; 116(34): 16793-16798.

By Elizabeth M. Luh

This dissertation contains two essays on disparate treatment in policing. The first chapter links this disparate treatment to bias in the context of highway trooper's stop and search decision. Highway police officers, or troopers, may misreport the race of people that they engage with in order to evade detection of racial bias. I propose a new test of racial bias in the presence of misreporting that is well-suited to explore the rich heterogeneity in bias behavior. Using a unique event in Texas where troopers were caught deliberately misreporting minority motorists as white, I find bias against all minority motorists, but especially against Hispanic motorists. I estimate bias for each trooper and find that over 30\% of troopers were engaging in this behavior. Using my trooper level measure of bias, I identify causal relationships between bias and labor outcomes using a panel data set of trooper employment outcomes. I show misreporting was used effectively to evade detection of bias, with bias having no effect on labor market outcomes when the misreporting was possible. I find that after a rule change to trooper stop recording policy in response to the misreporting led to negative labor outcomes for biased troopers, specifically, lower rates of promotion and had lower salary growth. I further test how individual trooper bias changes in response to changes in peer, demographic compositions. In particular, black or Hispanic troopers are sensitive to changes in peer composition, while white troopers are unaffected. The second chapter tests whether police officers disparately enforce parking…..

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  tickets across black and non-black neighborhoods. Using a plausibly exogenous increase in the fine for failing to purchase annual vehicle registration in 2012, colloquially known as the sticker tax, I test if Chicago police disparately enforced parking compliance across black and non-black neighborhoods from 2007 to 2017. I find that police behavior is responsive to the penalty structure of the fine and are 20 to 50 percent more likely to apply the sticker fine to black neighborhoods after the increase. This disparate enforcement is robust to employment controls and is not driven by changing compliance rates across neighborhoods. In contrast, I find that parking enforcement agents do not disparately enforce the tickets across black and non-black neighborhoods. I attribute this difference in behavior between parking enforcement agents and police officers to the lack of ticket quotas for police officers. Since police officers are not evaluated by their parking citation productivity, they do not behave as revenue-maximizing agents.

Houston, TX: University of Houston,  Department of Economics, 2020. 103p.

By Tracy C. Krueger, Sean Robson, Kirsten M. Keller

A guiding tenet of community policing is that trust and mutual respect between law enforcement and communities will more effectively address long-standing and complex public safety issues. One strategy to help establish such confidence is for law enforcement to adequately represent the demographic characteristics of the community it serves. Working to achieve this strategy can be challenging, however, because not everyone will be aware of, qualified for, or interested in a law enforcement career. The Colorado State Patrol (CSP) seeks to better reflect the demographic representation of the state of Colorado. This report offers an exploratory examination of how CSP's recruiting and selection policies and procedures relate to that objective. By integrating a review of CSP documents, interviews with CSP experts, and research and industry best practices, the authors identified potential barriers to diversity in CSP's early career stages and provide recommendations to mitigate and remove these barriers. This work is meant to act as a preliminary road map to assist CSP's future efforts in diversifying the demographic representation of its workforce. Barriers to diversity include the composition of the current workforce, the nature of the job, relocation requirements, and the lengthy hiring process. Recommendations include assessing propensity to apply, determining why applicants drop out, adjusting application windows, exploring strategies to shorten background investigations, and providing a realistic job preview.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2019, 26p.

By Magnus Lofstrom, Joseph Hayes, Brandon Martin, and Deepak Premkumar

Stark racial inequity has long been a deeply troubling aspect of our criminal justice system. In recent years, traffic stops have emerged as a key factor driving some of these inequities and an area of potential reform. Are there opportunities to identify kinds of traffic stops that could be enforced in alternative ways—potentially improving officer and civilian safety, enhancing police efficiency, and reducing racial disparities—without jeopardizing road safety?

To explore this question, in this report we use data on 3.4 million traffic stops made in 2019 by California’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies to examine racial disparities in stop outcomes and experiences across time of the day, type of law enforcement agency, and type of traffic violation.

San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2022. 29p.

By Frank R. Baumgartner; Derek A. Epp; Kelsey Shoub

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 294p.

By Greg Ridgeway

In 2002, the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) joined with other agencies and organizations to improve police-community relations in the city. This report focuses on the analysis of racial disparities in traffic stops in Cincinnati. The authors find no evidence of racial differences between the stops of black and those of similarly situated nonblack drivers, but some issues can exacerbate the perception of racial bias.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009. 93p.