Driver race, ethnicity, and gender and citizen reports of vehicle searches by police and vehicle search hits: toward a triangulated scholarly understanding.

• Author: Lundman, Richard J.

INTRODUCTION

The debate over race and ethnically targeted vehicle searches by police is currently dominated by two loosely organized and very different coalitions. The first consists of civil rights and social movement organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), professors of law, and investigative journalists. The members of this first coalition firmly oppose race and ethnically targeted vehicle searches by police, and their opposition is grounded in the argument that such searches are illegal and unproductive. (1) The ACLU's report, Driving While Black, is representative of the position of this first coalition:

Racial profiling is based on the premise that most drug offenses are committed by minorities. The premise is factually untrue, but it has nonetheless become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because police look for drugs primarily among African Americans and Latinos, they find a disproportionate number of them with contraband. Therefore, more minorities are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and jailed, thus reinforcing the perception that drug trafficking is primarily a minority activity.... [W]hite drivers receive far less police attention, many of the drug dealers and possessors among them go unapprehended, and the perception that whites commit fewer drug offenses than minorities is perpetuated. (2) The second coalition is composed of police administrators and officers and some of them openly support race and ethnically targeted vehicle searches by police. (3) Their support is firmly grounded in the argument that such searches are more likely to yield hits in the form of illegal evidence, especially drugs. Consider three illustrations: first, prior to being fired for trying to defend racial profiling, the Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, Carl Williams, stated: "Today, with this drug problem, the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with it." Second, Bernard Parks, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1997 to 2002, observed: "It's not the fault of police.... It's the fault of minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports." Third, the words of an experienced Maryland State Police Officer working Route 50 between Washington, DC and the Eastern Shore:

Ask me how many white people I've arrested for cocaine smuggling .... None! Zero! I debrief hundreds of black smugglers, and I ask them, "Why don't you hire white guys to deliver your drugs?" They just laugh at me. "We ain't gonna trust our drugs with white boys." That's what they say.... I dream at night about arresting white people for cocaine. I do. I try to think of innovative ways to arrest white males. But the reality is different. (4) With several important ongoing and hence preliminary exceptions detailed below, social science scholars have not been a visible and central part of the debate over race and ethnically targeted vehicle searches by police. Only a handful of published scholarly papers currently exist and most of them have been written by professors of law, appeared in law review journals, and been directed nearly exclusively at the constitutionality of race and ethnically targeted vehicle stops and searches. (5) Scholars in social science disciplines that have traditionally undertaken research on police and policing, such as criminal justice, criminology, and sociology, have not as yet published formal scholarly papers on vehicle searches and vehicle search hits.

There are, however, several important ongoing and therefore preliminary exceptions to the general absence of social science examination of vehicle searches and vehicle search hits. Researchers in criminal justice, criminology, sociology, and other scholarly disciplines are currently collaborating with law enforcement organizations collecting police-reported data on traffic stops, vehicle searches, and vehicle search hits. The results of some of these collaborative efforts have already been presented in preliminary report form. (6) Taken together, these preliminary data indicate: first, that vehicles of drivers of color are searched more often than vehicles of white drivers; and second that hit rates for whites are generally higher than hit rates for drivers of color.

Analyses grounded in police-reported data, however, pose distinct problems. Police officers know race, ethnicity, vehicle search, and vehicle search hit information, along with other data, are being collected (7) and they know why. (8) Police officers therefore have a strong incentive to provide false or incomplete data and sizeable numbers of police officers have been detected doing precisely that. (9) Cordner and colleagues, for instance, estimate that San Diego police reported only fifty-three percent of the traffic stops they made in predominantly African American and Hispanic police precincts during 2001. (10)

The solution is triangulation. (11) Because all data sources including police-reported data present problems, confident and complete understanding of the factors affecting vehicle searches and vehicle search hits necessarily requires patient examination using multiple sources, including police-reported, citizen-reported, and observer-reported data.

The present research therefore examines vehicle searches and vehicle search hits using citizen-reported data. My goals are threefold. The first is to add to the extensive scholarly literature on the effects of legal and extralegal variables on police actions. The second is to complement preliminary analyses of police-reported data with an analysis of citizen-reported data. The third is to move toward a triangulated scholarly understanding of the factors affecting vehicle searches by police and vehicle search hits.

LEGAL AND EXTRALEGAL VARIABLES AND POLICE ACTIONS

Scholars have known for a very long time that both legal and extralegal factors affect police actions. In the late 1940s, for instance, Goldman examined the factors affecting the decisions of police patrol officers during their encounters with juvenile offenders. (12) Goldman reported that the police officers he studied paid close attention to legal factors such as the seriousness of the offense as well as extralegal factors such as the race, nationality, and social class of juvenile offenders when making the decision to handle the juvenile formally or informally. (13) Also in the late 1940s, Westley studied the legal and extralegal factors that precipitated use of unnecessary force by police patrol officers in Gary, Indiana. (14) He reported that police were quicker to use unnecessary force as a means of soliciting information about serious crimes and when citizens did not show respect to officers.

Since these early studies and others like them, (15) there has been a steady stream of studies focused on the effects of legal and extralegal variables on police actions. (16) The accumulated data consistently support three observations. First, police are legal actors sensitive to legal factors. (17) The more serious the offense, the more likely police are to take formal action. (18) Second, extralegal variables are especially important in the context of minor and low-visibility police actions such as the decision to write a traffic ticket once a traffic stop has been made. (19) Third, and with the possible exception of demeanor, (20) no single extralegal variable consistently affects police actions. In particular, results concerning race and ethnicity have been mixed, with some studies finding them important (21) and others not. (22)

ONE LIMIT OF PREVIOUS RESEARCH

However, race and ethnically targeted vehicle searches by police have not been the focus of social science research on the effects of legal and extralegal variables on police actions. Older data bases that continue to be consulted and used by scholars .of police and policing such as the data assembled by Albert J. Reiss, Jr. in the mid 1960s, (23) the Midwest City Study from the early 1970s, (24) and the Police Services Study from the middle 1970s (25) either do not contain data on vehicle searches by police and search hits or those data have yet to be reported. More recent data bases such as those assembled by Klinger from Metro Dade County (26) also either do not contain information of vehicle searches and vehicle search hit rates or those data have not as yet been reported.

PRELIMINARY ANALYSES USING POLICE-REPORTED DATA

Despite the lack of formally published papers on vehicle searches and vehicle search hits, preliminary analyses using police-reported data have recently become available. Zingraff and colleagues, for instance, are collaborating with the North Carolina State Highway Patrol and they have reported the results of their preliminary analysis of police-reported vehicle searches and hits during 1998. (27) Their start points are the 223,241 African American and 683,517 white drivers stopped by Highway Patrol officers and either given a written warning or a ticket. Zingraff and colleagues (28) report five preliminary findings: first, searches by Highway Patrol officers are very rare events; there were only 826 police-reported searches out of the total of 906,758 drivers issued a written warning or a ticket. Second, seventy percent of the police-reported searches were carried out by Highway Patrol officers assigned to the Criminal Interdiction Team which "has primary responsibility for drug interdiction." (29) Third, vehicles driven by African Americans were searched more often than vehicles driven by whites--for African Americans, thirteen searches per 10,000 written warnings or tickets versus eight per 10,000 written warnings or tickets for whites. Fourth, with Criminal Interdiction Team searches...