Oakland stop data shows racial disparities across most officers, not a few

Evidence

Highlighting “few” implies the probability that race will influence officers is low. It implies that race will only affect a small percentage of law enforcement. However, in our research in Oakland, for example, the disparities we uncovered were not concentrated in the behavior of just a handful of officers. In a thirteen-month period, three-quarters of all officers who made stops never handcuffed, searched, or arrested a White person they stopped. The majority of these same officers, however, had performed these actions on the African Americans they had stopped (Hetey et al., 2016a). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 391

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to systemic-bias literature and the reader’s interest in institutional vs. individual explanations of harm.

Related

• Oakland officers who never restrained white people still searched Black people (similarity 0.93)
• Oakland police show racial disparities across every interaction stage (similarity 0.91)
• Police treatment disparities span stops, abuse, force, and response speed (similarity 0.83)
• Crime-rate differences cannot fully explain racial disparities in police stops. (similarity 0.83)
• Ambiguous police stops confirm minorities’ belief that officers are racist (similarity 0.82)
• Racial stop disparities hold even in precincts with few minority residents (similarity 0.82)
• Studies find racial bias throughout justice-system actors including officers (similarity 0.82)
• Black drivers are stopped for minor offenses requiring more officer discretion (similarity 0.81)
• Racial disparities persist even in precincts where people of color are a small minority. (similarity 0.81)
• Racial disparities in traffic stops increase when officers can see a driver’s race. (similarity 0.80)
• Data-driven policy analysis can measurably reduce racial enforcement disparities. (similarity 0.79)
• Racial disparity in police stops widens when officers can visually ascertain the driver’s race (similarity 0.79)
• Racial disparities research on prosecution remains sparse, unlike policing and sentencing (similarity 0.79)
• Institutional practices can produce racial disparities without any racist intent (similarity 0.79)
• Measuring racial bias in stops requires choosing an appropriate benchmark (similarity 0.79)