‘Driving While Black’ Is a Real Issue

Analysis of millions of traffic stops reveals that racial disparities are indeed a serious problem nationwide

Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a book co-authored by Kelsey Shoub, currently on the political science faculty of the University of South Carolina. She and her co-authors analyzed 14 years of traffic stop data in the State of North Carolina after a mandate from the state legislature to gather information intended to either confirm or refute reported racial disparities in traffic stops.

Although the main data collection took place in North Carolina, Shoub says that her takeaways from the study were definitive, “The first is that ‘driving while black’ is very much a thing; it’s everywhere and it’s not just a North Carolina or a Southern problem but across the United States,” Shoub says. “The second thing is that it appears to be more systemic than a few ‘bad apple’ officers engaged in racial profiling.”

Shoub and her co-authors also gathered and analyzed traffic stop data from law enforcement agencies in 16 other states, including Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and Vermont that pointed to similar disparities as those identified in North Carolina in the rate at which black drivers were stopped and searched compared to white drivers.

Significant findings from Shoub’s and her colleagues’ analysis of the North Carolina dataset include:

Blacks were 63 percent more likely to be stopped even though, as a whole, they drive 16 percent less. Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95 percent more likely to be stopped.

Blacks were 115 percent more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop (5.05 percent for blacks, 2.35 percent for whites).

Contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers.

In other unrelated research, the same things were reported, “We start by analyzing the rates at which police stop motorists in locations across the country, relative to the population in those areas. The data show that officers generally stop black drivers at higher rates than white drivers, and stop Hispanic drivers at similar or lower rates than white drivers. These broad patterns persist after controlling for the drivers’ age and gender.”

Since Shoub’s report actually documented that white drivers were more likely to be found with contraband when searched, this further confirms that bias is taking place. Black drivers are being pulled over at least some of the time on the assumption that they must be up to something illegal based on nothing but their race.

Shoub has also studied the outcomes of finding contraband by gender of the officer and discovered that female officers are proportionally much more likely to find contraband even though they initiate fewer searches and there are a lot fewer of them than male officers. This indicates that female officers tend to be making more searches based on probable cause and not fishing expeditions — an interesting side element of this problem.

“So, black drivers were stopped disproportionately more than white drivers compared to the local population and were at least twice as likely to be searched, but they were slightly less likely to get a ticket,” Shoub says. “That correlates with the idea that black drivers were stopped on the pretext of having done something wrong, and when the officer doesn’t see in the car what he thought he might, he tells them to go on their way.”

Yet another separate study that analyzed nearly 100 million traffic stops came to the same conclusions.

• Black drivers are stopped more often than whites, and the degree of disparity is larger among municipal police stops than state police stops. However, Hispanic drivers are stopped at slightly lower rates than white drivers.
• Black and Hispanic drivers are more likely than white drivers to have their vehicle searched; the authors indicate that “the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers is generally lower than for searching white drivers.”

In Malcolm Gladwell’s 2019 book, Talking To Strangers he explores in depth what went wrong in the Sandra Bland case. As you may recall, Bland was pulled over in Texas by Officer Brian Encinia. He pulled Bland over for failing to use her turn signal when changing lanes — a fishing expedition that he’d done with several other people in the 30 minutes prior to Bland’s stop. These fishing expeditions were standard police practice.

Here is some testimony excerpted from the subsequent investigation:

Renfro: OK. After you asked Bland for her driver’s license, you then asked her where she was headed and she replied, “It doesn’t matter.” You wrote in your report, “I knew at this point based on her demeanor that something was wrong.”

In his deposition, Encinia is now being questioned by state investigator Cleve Renfro.

Renfro: Explain for the recording what you thought was wrong.

Encinia: …It was an aggressive body language and demeanor. It appeared that she was not okay.

Brian Encinia believed in transparency — that people’s demeanor is a reliable guide to their emotions and character. This is something we teach one another. More precisely, it is something we teach police officers. The world’s most influential training program for law enforcement, for example, is called the Reid Technique. It is used in something like two-thirds of U.S. state police departments — not to mention the FBI and countless other law-enforcement agencies around the world — and the Reid system is based directly on the idea of transparency: it instructs police officers, when dealing with people they do not know, to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Talking to Strangers (p. 327). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

The problem with this is, if you and the people you know have been hassled by the police for little or no reason for hundreds of years, you are likely to be nervous, defensive, or otherwise not meeting the regular metrics of transparency according to the Reid Technique when pulled over for seemingly no real reason.

The Reid Technique is an essential element of the so-called Kansas City style of policing, which is also widely used throughout the US. It essentially encourages the police to treat anyone even vaguely suspicious like a suspect and to attempt to ferret out crime by looking for serious criminal activity under any other pretext for stopping and questioning someone. In a culture where Blacks are routinely portrayed as being inherently dangerous and criminal, this means they are more often considered suspicious just for existing.

What is Sandra Bland? She is also mismatched (her actions are not inherently problematic, but they don’t meet the expectations of transparency metrics). She looks to Encinia’s eye like a criminal. But she’s not. She’s just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had had ten previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8,000 in outstanding fines.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Talking to Strangers (p. 330). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

After the incident escalated Bland was eventually arrested. She was in emotionally fragile shape by her own account before the arrest, but in jail she behaved like someone in crisis, constantly crying and in obvious distress. After three days Sandra Bland killed herself. There was great public outcry, including allegations that perhaps she had been murdered.

Looking at the case in hindsight it was common to paint Encinia as an officer without empathy. But, as Gladwell points out, that characterization misses the point. “Someone without empathy is indifferent to another’s feelings. Encinia is not indifferent to Bland’s feelings. When he approaches her car, one of the first things he says to her is, “What’s wrong?” When he returns to her car after checking her license, he asks again: “Are you okay?” He picks up on her emotional discomfort immediately. It’s just that he completely misinterprets what her feelings mean. He becomes convinced that he is sliding into a frightening confrontation with a dangerous woman.”

Gladwell’s further analysis of how this sort of “searching for a criminal needle in a haystack” tactic of policing adversely affects those who are what I would call closer to the bottom of the social dominance hierarchy makes perfect sense. Although Gladwell doesn’t use those terms, it’s clear to me that those with less historical power or privilege are more likely to be viewed with greater suspicion in this highly suspicious system simply for being poor, or disabled, or Black.

Whites are being subjected to this “needle in a haystack” method of looking for crime as well. In the minutes before pulling over Sandra Bland, Officer Encinio had also stopped a truck driver and ticketed him for not having the appropriate reflective tape on his trailer. He’d ticketed two different women for minor license plate infractions. But perhaps because able-bodied Whites are the more normative citizen in this culture, they are more often given the benefit of the doubt unless there is a concrete reason not to do so. Remember, more contraband is found in the cars of Whites, as well as on more White people detained in stop and frisk activity.

The well-established social hierarchy has long tasked the police with protecting those closer to the top of the pyramid from those on the lower rungs. After all, one of the central aspects of a dominance-based hierarchy is that the social stratification is maintained through aggression and often violence. It’s the way that both our culture and policing are currently designed. Although statistically, more violent crime is committed by those who are poor, simply existing while poor or existing while Black should not be sufficient reason to suspect someone of a crime. After all, more contraband is found on Whites during both traffic stops and stop and frisk activity.

The issues of “driving while Black” come either out of overt racism, subconscious beliefs about the trustworthiness of those who have historically been on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, or a combination of both. We can’t yet say definitively, and in fact, it may vary from case to case. But what we can say for certain is that there is no question that there is a huge disparity between how Blacks and Whites are treated during traffic stops. The next step is to figure out what to do about it.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2021 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.