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Unpublished paper, 2022. 54p.