Beyond Profiling: The Institutional Sources of Racial Disparities in Policing

• Author: Charles R. Epp,Steven Maynard‐Moody,Donald Haider‐Markel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12702
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

168 Public Administration Review • March | April 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 2, pp. 168–178. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12702.

Beyond Profiling:

The Institutional Sources of Racial Disparities in Policing

Donald Haider-Markel is professor

and chair of political science at the

University of Kansas. His research and

teaching is focused on the representation

of interests in the policy process and the

dynamics between public opinion, political

behavior, and public policy.

E-mail: prex@ku.edu

Steven Maynard-Moody is professor

in the School of Public Affairs and

Administration and director of the Institute

for Policy and Social Research at the

University of Kansas. He is coauthor, with

Charles Epp and Donald Haider-Markel, of

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race

and Citizenship

(University of Chicago,

2014). With Michael Musheno, his current

research and writing extends the theoretical

frame first expressed in their book

Cops,

Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the

Front Lines of Public Service

(University of

Michigan Press, 2003).

E-mail: smm@ku.edu

Charles R. Epp is University

Distinguished Professor in the School

of Public Affairs and Administration at

the University of Kansas. He is author of

three books published by the University

of Chicago Press, including

Making Rights

Real

(2009) on police reform and

Pulled

Over: How Police Stops Define Race and

Citizenship

(2014), with the coauthors of

this article, on racial disparities in police

stops.

E-mail: chuckepp@ku.edu

Abstract : American policing faces a crisis of legitimacy. A key source of this crisis is a widespread police practice

commonly endorsed by police leaders to fight crime. This is the investigatory stop, used to check out people who seem

suspicious and to seize illegal drugs and guns and make arrests. Using data from an original scientific survey of

drivers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, the authors show that racial disparities in police stops are concentrated

in investigatory vehicle stops. In these stops, but not others, officers disproportionately stop African Americans and

question and search them. The overwhelming majority of people stopped in this way are innocent, and the experience

causes psychological harm and erodes trust in and cooperation with the police. Many of the most controversial police

shootings during the past two years occurred in these stops. Reforming this practice is an essential step toward restoring

trust in the police.

Practitioner Points

• Although evidence of their effectiveness is not clear, investigatory police stops (commonly using minor

violations as a pretext for a more searching inquiry) are widely used by local police departments as a crime-

fighting tactic.

• Most people stopped in investigatory stops are innocent, yet they are subjected to intrusive questioning

(e.g., “Why are you in the neighborhood?”) and searches, leading to feelings of fear and of being “violated.”

• Overuse of investigatory police stops erodes trust in, and cooperation with, the police, especially among

African Americans, who are especially likely to be stopped.

• There is insufficient oversight of the practice, as many investigatory stops yield no citation and so are not

presently recorded or reported.

• To enable oversight of this practice, law enforcement agencies should require officers to record and report all

stops they make, including the race and ethnicity of the driver and whether a warning or citation is issued;

these data should be analyzed to check for patterns of racial disparity. Surveys of satisfaction with police

services should include questions regarding residents’ experiences in police stops, including stops for minor

violations.

Charles R. Epp

Steven Maynard-Moody

Donald Haider-Markel

University of Kansas

P olicing in the United States is in crisis, a

“perfect storm” of popular protest and media

coverage of egregious violations (Weitzer

2015 , 475). Since the protests in Ferguson,

Missouri, over the shooting death of Michael

Brown on August 9, 2014, protests have erupted

in Baltimore, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Chicago,

Cleveland, Los Angeles, Madison, Minneapolis-St.

Paul, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, Tulsa, and

such smaller places as Hempstead, Texas; North

Charleston, South Carolina; Pasco, Washington; and

Stonewall, Mississippi. The relationship between the

police and these communities, so essential to public

safety and the rights and dignity of members of the

public, is strained, if not broken. Nor is the problem

isolated locally. A recent national survey found

that 84 percent of African Americans believe that

blacks are treated less fairly by the police than whites

(Stepler 2016 ).

Official mechanisms of police accountability have

been mobilized. Eighteen individual officers were

criminally indicted for police killings in 2015, the

last year for which data are available, roughly triple

the number in past years (Babwin 2015 ; Wing 2015 ).

The U.S. Department of Justice has conducted formal

investigations in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago,

on top of several others begun before the events in

Ferguson. Several prominent police chiefs, including

Baltimore police commissioner Anthony Batts,

Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy, and

San Francisco police chief Gregory P. Suhr, as well

as a series of chiefs in Oakland, have been fired. The

Barack Obama administration convened a high-level