Public Safety and Police Traffic Stops

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Policing

Abstract

Police justify traffic stops as an important tool in the war on crime, allowing officers to interact with motorists they deem suspicious, conduct searches, and make arrests. Here we ask: how valuable are they? How many high-value convictions result from a traffic stop? This information is essential to understanding whether the racial equity cost of traffic stops being used as part of the war on crime (as opposed to those designed to control bad driving) is out-weighed by a high crime-fighting value. If there is high crime-fighting value to traffic stops, then a significant proportion of all criminal convictions should stem from traffic stops, and these should be associated with serious, not small, infractions. We assess this by looking at every criminal arrest in North Carolina during the period of 2013 to 2018, isolating those that were made subsequent to a traffic stop. We then determine if these arrests resulted in criminal convictions and the sentencing severity. We find that traffic stops rarely produce arrests of any kind, when they do the arrests rarely lead to convictions, and those convictions are rarely on serious charges. These results call into question the contribution of investigative traffic stops to public safety. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation of its kind, leveraging a near-comprehensive arrest record for a single state.

Authors

• Frank R. Baumgartner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Marty Davidson, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

• Derek Epp, University of Texas at Austin

• Kaneesha Johnson, Harvard University