Routine traffic stops erode police-community trust more than famous shootings

Evidence

Across America, tensions between police and communities are at an alltime high. The fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black eighteen-year-old, by Darren Wilson, a White police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, has been called “America’s great awakening” to long-standing issues of race and fractured police-community relations (Lowery, 2016, p. 18). This relationship has been fraught for generations and implicates a centuries old history of systems of policing to enforce social control and explicit discrimination against Blacks in America (Hawkins & Thomas, 1991). Whereas much public attention has focused on well-publicized fatal incidents, trust between police and communities is also eroded through mundane everyday encounters (Epp, Maynard-Moody & Haider-Markel, 2014). Routine stops are the most common interaction the public has with the police. In a given year in the United States, one in four people of driving-age will have an interaction with the police, and nearly half (44 percent) of those interactions are traffic stops (Eith & Durose, 2011). By examining these routine police contacts, researchers have consistently uncovered evidence of racial disparities throughout the entire course of the interaction. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 347

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: the mundane mechanism of trust erosion vs. the spectacular incident — the quotidian traffic stop as the actual site of systemic racial disparity.
• XREF: Connects to the Ferguson/Black Lives Matter literature and to Tyler’s procedural justice research on legitimacy, cooperation, and compliance.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 347