Racial Profiling: Examining Racial Differences in Law-Violating Driving Behavior in San Diego

• In Event: Examining Police Officer Decision-Making

Abstract

To assess if people of color are targeted for police stops, law-violating driving behavior should be assessed to determine their risk of being stopped due to potentially higher rates of law-violating driving behavior. The handful of studies establishing racial differences in driving behavior come with methodological flaws (i.e., coding skin tone for race) and are outdated, suggesting a need to more rigorously determine if there are racial differences in driving behavior. To assess law-violating driving behavior by race, we turn to a more objective measure of driving behavior: serious, at fault traffic accidents. Using Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS) data from 2015-2018 in San Diego, CA, we find that within-race percentages of being at-fault in accidents fall between 40-50%. While chi-square tests show dependence between race and being at-fault, the Cramer’s V statistics are small (~0.04), showing weak associations between race and being at-fault in accidents. Coupled with other scholarship showing the relative ease of determining a legally valid reason to make a traffic stop as well as qualitative findings surrounding people of color’s experience with being pulled over, our findings suggest race-specific law-violating behavior may not be a necessary component in estimating racial profiling by the police.

Authors

• Danielle Wallace, Arizona State University

• Cathy Liu, University of Utah

• Ran Wei, University of California, Riverside

• Jason Walker, Arizona State University

• Yirong Zhou, University of Utah

• Tony Grubesic, University of Texas at Austin