Police Officers’ Search Trajectories: Do Police Searches Get More Accurate (and Less Biased) with Experience?

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 5. Effects of Race & Place on Policing Policy and Practice

Abstract

Racial bias from police is a contentious social problem that has drawn considerable attention from activists, policy-makers, and scholars. When making traffic stops officers intentionally or unintentionally use stereotypes of black men and black women to decide whether to conduct searches for drugs, weapons, and other contraband. Several tests, including the probability of a search for stopped drivers and the hit-rate of finding evidence, are used to assess the extent of racial disparities and whether reasonable suspicion standards are applied equally to all people. Most research has treated departments as a whole and pooled all officers without taking into account their position within the institution and how officers may change their behavior over time. This paper tracks and compares officers who are white, black, and non-black people of color in Nashville, TN following completion of their police academy for their first three years on the force. Results show that in the first year after the academy, officers across racial group are nearly identical in their search patterns but black officer reduce their search rate in subsequent years for all drivers. Non-black officers of color reduce the rate of searches for black men and women they stop. Over time, officers generally improved in their ability to find evidence during a search but the hit rate for evidence is lower for black drivers than white drivers indicating that race is used as a proxy for suspicion equally across racial groups of officers.

Author

• Peter Vielehr, Metro Nashville Government