By The United States Commission on Civil Rights,  Minnesota Advisory Committee 

The nature and scope of the problem. There will be no end to disparate policing, and the accompanying resentment in the community, until sufficient data can be collected to better inform both policymakers and the People who elect them. Disparate policing is abusive on many levels, affecting the individuals involved, reopening unhealed wounds left by historical injustices, and reminding entire communities that their lives don’t matter. The Committee found that the lack of political will at all levels of government to enforce the limits on police conduct is the major impediment to meaningful change that would address the Constitutional violations identified in this report.  

Minneapolis:: Minnesota Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights ,2022. 62p.

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 The U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Oklahoma Advisory Committee

In 1981, the Commission issued a seminal report on police practices in America, Who is Guarding the Guardians? Twenty years later the Commission issued a follow-up report, Revisiting Who is Guarding the Guardians? Both reports raised troubling concerns about insular police practices that undermine equal protection under the law. Now, forty years after the Commission’s first report on police practices, a number of public incidents involving police conduct have returned such concerns to the forefront of national conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.1 The movement has increasingly gained national attention since its founding through organizing and demonstrations against racial inequality, particularly police use of force against Black people. High profile incidents of deadly force by police include the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH, Walter Scott in North Charleston, SC, Sandra Bland, in Prairie View, TX, and many others. In June 2020, protests against police use of force, particularly force against Black victims, became one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history, with about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participating in demonstrations. 2 These protests started in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. The movement calls for widespread police reform and accountability for allegedly race-motivated violence against people of color, as well as calling for broader race equity in the U.S.3 On June 6, 2020 an estimated half a million people participated in public protests in nearly 550 places across the United States. As of July 3, 2020, there had been an estimated 4,700 demonstrations in all 50 states.

Washington, DC; The Commission, 2021. 26p.

By Fabien Jobard and René Lévy

French residents of immigrant origin, particularly those of North African and sub-Saharan African background, have long complained that police single them out for unfair, discriminatory, and unnecessary identity checks. If these perceptions are true, it means that French police are engaged in “ethnic profiling.” That is, police officers are basing decisions about who may be suspicious on the basis of the color of their skin or their assumed ethnic identity rather than on the basis of their individual behavior. In 2007, the Open Society Justice Initiative launched a study to examine whether and to what extent law enforcement officers stop individuals based on their appearance. This study was conducted in collaboration with Fabien Jobard and René Lévy, researchers with the National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France. The study was carried out under the technical supervision of Lamberth Consulting. Examining five locations in and around the Gare du Nord and Châtelet-Les Halles rail stations, all important transit points in central Paris that are also the sites of heavy police activity, Profiling Minorities : A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris gathered data on police stops carried out by National Police and Customs officers, including information on the ethnicity, age, gender, clothing, and bags carried by the persons who were stopped. This study, which generated unique information on over 500 police stops, is the first to gather the quantitative data necessary to identify and detect patterns of ethnic profiling in France. The study confirmed that police stops and identity checks in Paris are principally based on the appearance of the person stopped, rather than on their behavior or actions. Persons perceived to be ethnic minorities were disproportionately stopped by the police. The results show that persons perceived to be “Black” (of sub-Saharan African or Caribbean origin) and “Arab” (of North African or Maghrebian origin) were stopped at proportionally much higher rates than persons perceived to be “White” (of Western European origin). Across the five observations sites, Blacks were overall six times more likely than Whites to be stopped by police ; the site-specific rates of disproportionality ranged from 3.3 to 11.5. Arabs were generally 7.6 times more likely than Whites to be stopped by the police, although again, the specific rate of disproportionality across the five locations ranged from 1.8 and 14.8. Follow-up interviews with the individuals who were stopped also suggest that these two groups regularly experience far more police stops than Whites.

New York: Open Society Institute, 2019. 82p.