Driving while black

Abstract: Racial profiling of drivers - often called "driving while black" - has taken an increasingly important role in the public debate on issues of race and criminal justice. It is one of the few such issues that has penetrated not only the public discourse, but the legislative process as well. This article takes three different approaches in attempting to explain that racial profiling is important not only for its own sake, but because it is a manifestation - both a symbol and a symptom - of all of the most difficult problems that we face at the intersection of race and criminal justice. First, the stories of a number of African Americans, selected not for their egregiousness but for their typicality, are used to illustrate the personal pain, humiliation, and anguish racial profiling inflicts on individual people of color. Second, the article marshalls statistical evidence, including the author's own study of four metropolitan areas in Ohio, to show that profiling is not an exaggeration of a few isolated incidents into a social trend, but a real and measurable phenomenon. Third, the bulk of the article aims to show how racial profiling is connected to many of the different issues of race and criminal justice that are on the table today, such as stereotypes of black criminality, rational discrimination by law enforcement, and disproportionate rates of imprisonment among blacks, to name a few. The upshot of the analysis is that "driving while black" may serve as a way for many in the majority to begin to come to grips with issues of race and criminal justice in ways that they have not before.

Abstract: We estimate the degree of racial disparity in police vehicular stops separately for local and state police in North Carolina in the year 2000. We introduce four mechanisms that might produce racial disparities in police stops—racial profiling, race sensitive police deployment, cognitive bias and stereotyping, and prejudice. We then model the relative odds of police vehicle stops as a function of race, driving behavior, and other demographic statuses separately by police organization type, with controls for omitted variable bias at both the driver and spatial level. We find only weak evidence of racial disparity in stops by officers of the state highway patrol but stronger evidence in those made by local police officers.

Abstract: This chapter argues that the car’s power can be used to illuminate some neglected aspects of the twentieth century’s black freedom struggles. The twentieth century was the century of the automobile, of auto-mobility and mass motorization. Commerce in motor vehicles constitutes the overheated core of unchecked and unsustainable consumer capitalism, but the impact of car culture extends far beyond those buoyant commercial processes. The determinedly critical standpoint outlined is offered as a route into a more motivated political history of car cultures than is available. During the period of decolonization and the era of Black Power that responded to it, the basic idea of black solidarity depended upon building a transnational bridge across the chasm of imperial exploitation and combined but uneven development. The planetary reach of the African-American vernacular has meant that globalizing black culture has been repeatedly oriented towards north American standards, desires and passions.

Abstract: Introduction Overview 1 A Sketch of the Policeman's Working Personality 2 Driving While Black 3 The Stories, the Statistics, and the Law 4 Legitimacy and Cooperation 5 Race and Policing in Different Ecological Contexts 6 Racially Biased Policing 7 Methods for Assessing Racially Biased Policing 8 Using Geographic Information Systems to Study Race, Crime, and Policing 9 Beyond Stop Rates 10 State of the Science in Racial Profi ling Research 11 Driving While Black 12 Citizens' Demeanor, Race, and Traffic Stops 13 Street Stops and Broken Windows Revisited 14 Community Characteristics and Police Search Rates 15 Blind Justice: Police Shootings in Memphis 16 Race, Bias, and Police Use of the TASER 17 Space, Place, and Immigration 18 Revisiting the Role of Latinos and Immigrants in Police Research 19 New Avenues for Profi ling and Bias Research 20 Preventing Racially Biased Policing through Internal and External Controls 21 Democratic Policing 22 Moving Beyond Profiling: The Virtues of RandomizationAbout the ContributorsIndex