Traffic stops are the most common way citizens encounter the police, and Black drivers often feel that officers use stops to target people of color. Evidence is clear that people of color are disproportionately stopped by the police. Yet police officers often say that they make stops based on policing instincts and protocols, not based in racism.
Rather than debating whether racism is at the root of those stops, Travis Carter and his team of researchers from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University took another tack, by developing a dashboard for Michigan State Police troopers to identify traffic-stop racial disparities.
“Regardless of whether (the stops) are indicative of racial bias, disparity is undesirable and negatively impacts how Black U.S. citizens perceive and interact with the police,” Carter writes, in a study published this month in Criminology & Public Policy, in an issue devoted specifically to Policing Practice and Policy.
MSP implemented two traffic-stop data dashboards, one for supervisor use and one for troopers, along with directives on how to use the data within a group of randomly assigned posts. The idea to encourage MSP troopers and their commanders to be more aware of the racial breakdowns within their traffic stops, by providing them with real-data data on their stops. Ultimately, MSP anticipated that such efforts would reduce traffic stop disparities throughout time. It could also provide a data-informed approach to intervene with troopers at risk of "problematic behavior," the authors wrote.
The concept is a new one. The authors say that their study is the first to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of a dashboard intervention aimed at reducing traffic stop disparities.
In the end, the dashboard did not impact racially disparate stop behavior.
But the results may be less indicative of the dashboard itself and more indicative of the barriers that researchers face when brought into a department, tasked with implementing new protocols and gain trust.
Interviews showed that MSP troopers did not buy into the dashboard’s concept and did not see its purpose – because they did not see a problem with the status quo. “Many interviewed troopers referred to taking a “colorblind” approach to their traffic stop behavior,” the authors write. “Although this approach is grounded in the principle of treating all drivers equally, it carries with it the perception that racial disparities in policing are only important if they result from discrimination.” Also, the authors found that the prevailing narrative was that the dashboard had little to do with “real police work.”
The troopers were 90% white and 91% male.
As one trooper said, “What’s the point of looking to see who we’re pulling over if it’s not biased in any way?” If most troopers and post commanders did not believe there was a problem with racial disparities in their traffic stops, it is not surprising they would view the dashboard as unnecessary, the authors wrote.
There was also widespread skepticism. “It is noteworthy that no one believed the dashboard’s purpose was to reduce disparities,” the authors write.
As a result, the innovation was barely used. “All but one trooper said they rarely or never use the dashboard. The main reason given by both troopers and post commanders was that viewing the dashboard could alter their behavior.”
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