Frank R. Baumgartner > Quotes

“Findings are troubling – we show that Hispanics are subject to harsher outcomes at rates that often exceed even what we found for blacks. When it comes to contraband, discretionary searches of Hispanics are woefully less productive; officers are almost 50 percent less likely to find contraband on Hispanic than white drivers after consent searches. This is perhaps not surprising, given research that recent immigrants are less likely to be involved in serious crime, but police appear to be operating under different assumptions, as Hispanics are much more likely than whites to experience a search. It seems that whites really are a privileged class when it comes to driving on the roadways; minorities – black or Hispanic – are subject to much higher rates of punitive treatment, such as fruitless search.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Consistently in implementing the war on drugs, police agencies have made clear that “you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince” – very large numbers of traffic stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment (see Webb 2007). Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number could be searched or arrested in the hope of finding a large cache of drugs. Those who were momentarily detained were said by the Court to have suffered only a trivial inconvenience. The key element in this targeting, which kept it hidden for so long from those who might have objected, was that middle-class Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. On the other hand, members of minority groups, especially young men, were subjected to a lot more than just an occasional trivial inconvenience. Police routinely targeted poor neighborhoods, individuals with certain forms of dress, males rather than females, younger people rather than older ones, and minorities rather than whites.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Our analysis suggests that ratcheting up the use of traffic stops as a crime fighting strategy has little positive effect on crime but dramatically negative effects on racial disparities, on alienation and trust in the minority community, and on community cooperation with the police.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“First, there are stark differences. Second, young men of color are clearly targeted for more aggressive treatment. Third, these differences are not fully justified by differences in criminality. Fourth, the aggressive use of traffic stops as a tool to investigate possible criminal behavior, though justified as part of the war on crime, is surprisingly inefficient, rarely leading to arrests for contraband.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, “the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers’ suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit” (US DOJ 2015, 65). Recent research by Stanford scientists suggests that this is also a problem in North Carolina (Simoiu, Corbett-Davies, and Goel 2017). The authors, using hierarchical statistical models that leverage geographic variation in stop outcomes, find that officers have a much lower search threshold when interacting with black and Hispanic motorists.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Altogether, fewer than 10 percent of citizen interactions with the police involve criminal investigations, and almost 60 percent involve traffic stops or accidents, with routine traffic stops by far the most common source of all police contact”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Armed with officer-level statistics, North Carolina’s police chiefs could have informed discussions with their officers about standards for searching motorists. Those with extremely high hit rates might be asked why they only search when they are virtually certain of finding contraband, such as when it is plainly visible. Similarly, those with very low hit rates might be counselled that they are inconveniencing large numbers of citizens with little to show for it. Is that because they need more training on how to recognize those carrying contraband, or what might be the reason such a high percent of their searches bear no fruit?”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Where these sociodemographic groups overlap is where police attention is most focused. Thus, millions of Americans have been targeted for more intensive police attention outside of the gaze or knowledge of most middle-class whites. And it has not been trivial at all. It has been humiliating, frustrating, and unfair. Beyond all that, it has been ineffective.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“The sources of covert racial bias are found all around us and are parts of US history. They are not particular to the criminal justice system, but given the powerful effects of race on criminal justice matters, and the over-representation of minorities in the criminal justice system, there should be no surprise that many associate crime with minorities, particularly young males. Crucially, according to the accumulated social psychological literature, no one growing up in mainstream US culture would be immune to these pressures (see for example Gillian and Iyengar 2000). Furthermore, within the police profession, there is ample reason to expect that such biases may be especially strong. In particular, as relates to the decision to shoot or not to shoot a hypothetical suspect in an ambiguous experimental setting, the black suspects are typically shot in a higher percentage of the cases than an identically situated white suspect (see for example Correll et al. 2002; Correll et al. 2007; Correll 2009).”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“it is predominantly when officers must make a decision about whether or not to conduct a search that blacks are disadvantaged. Most importantly, the figure tells us that the statewide evidence of racial disparity from Table 5.5 is not being driven by a handful of bad apple police agencies. The problem is system wide. Twenty-two out of twenty-five agencies are worse at searching blacks with consent and twenty-one are worse at searching blacks with probable cause. This paints a bleak picture of the ability of officers to determine when a black driver should be searched.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Our argument is that it is not contact with the police per se that is problematic. In fact, the results of the study suggest that when the police deal with people in ways that they experience as being fair, contact promotes trust and a variety of types of desirable public behavior. Rather, it is contact that communicates suspicion and mistrust that undermines the relationship between the public and the police.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Thus the major take-away from the chapter is that the problems we have documented are systemic, the result of widespread institutional standards that pressure officers, either explicitly or implicitly, to direct undue attention to minority drivers.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Collectively, police have a contraband hit rate of 29 percent (or 12 percent, looking only at arrest-worthy contraband).”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Taken together, NC police show some alarming tendencies, namely a propensity to search blacks at a much higher rate than whites, even as they are less likely to find contraband on blacks (at least when there is discretion involved).”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“The math is simple, and laid out in Table 5.6. From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The “sheer numbers game” the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Most important is that in almost every year Hispanics are more likely than whites to experience these types of search and less likely than whites to be found with contraband”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Whereas 3 percent of traffic stops lead to a search, only about one-third of those searches lead to contraband. Further, only about half of those contraband hits lead to arrest, which is not surprising because when we look at the amounts of contraband found, it is typically that associated with a user, not a distributor, of the item in question.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“As the US Justice Department explains in their report on the Ferguson PD, “the lower rate at which officers find contraband when searching African-Americans indicates either that officers’ suspicion of criminal wrongdoing is less likely to be accurate when interacting with African-Americans or that officers are more likely to search African-Americans without any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. Either explanation suggest bias, whether explicit or implicit” (US DOJ 2015, 65).”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“Traffic stops rarely yield contraband, and when they do, it is in such small amounts that the most common outcome is a ticket. Just 12 percent of searches lead to the discovery of a large enough amount of contraband to merit arrest.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“This means that officers must stop many more blacks than whites before whites begin to look “out of place.” If it is true that the traffic stops an officer makes reflect the racial make-up of the area in which they are patrolling, then it would seem that whites in a black area do not appear to raise the same suspicions as blacks in a white area.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

“The fact that Hispanic drivers are less likely to have contraband does not seem to stop officers from searching them much more than white drivers.”
― Frank R. Baumgartner, Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race