Welcome to our August newsletter! We hope your summer is going well and you are finding ways to stay cool. Our coalition has been meeting once a month to discuss the work we are doing, and research in the field. Last month, Matt Graham of the Center for Policing Equity presented; he is one of the authors of the report “Racial Disparities in Use of Force at Traffic Stops.” While many of the findings and conclusions in this report may be familiar to those following this subject, there were some important analyses about use of force that you may not be aware of. For example, the report notes based on an analysis of California traffic stops, that police use force on drivers pulled over for non-safety stops more often than drivers pulled over for safety stops. One might think the converse would be true. The report stated: Police were more likely to use force on people of all racial groups when the reason for pulling the person over was a non-safety stop, but the increased likelihood was greater for Black and Latine drivers than for White drivers. Officers were 1.9 times as likely to use force on White drivers at a non-safety stop than at a safety stop; this number increased to them being 2.9 times more likely to use force on Black drivers at non-safety stops than at safety stops, and 2.4 times as likely to use force on Latine drivers at non-safety stops than at safety stops. Other significant findings discussed in the report were that: “Discretionary searches, which are associated with a greater likelihood of use of force, were initiated by officers more frequently at non-safety stops than safety stops.” -
“Officers were three times more likely to search White drivers at non-safety stops than at safety stops, but seven times more likely to search Black and Latine drivers at non-safety stops than at safety stops. At the same time, police discovered contraband at roughly the same rate in safety and non-safety stops (19.5% versus 21.3%, respectively for all searches, regardless of driver racial group).” -
“Police officers initiating a discretionary search was also strongly correlated with whether they used force. Across the eight agencies studied, force was more than 14 times more likely in stops that involved a discretionary search, regardless of whether contraband was found, than in stops that did not involve a search.” -
“Police routinely use force at traffic stops, even with no resulting arrest. There is a longstanding assumption that all or most police uses of force result in arrests. However, (they found) that, of the 11,088 use of force incidents at traffic stops analyzed across these eight cities, police recorded an arrest at just 3,583 of them, or 32.3%. Police documented using force without documenting an accompanying arrest on drivers who were pulled over for a non-safety stop three times as often as drivers pulled over for safety stops.” While the harm of injury from these stops has been something we have discussed before, this report spells out the increased likelihood of harm to Black and brown people subjected to secondary stops. Our next meeting is on Wednesday, September 17 at 4 PM. Meetings are on the third Wednesday from 4-5. If you would like to join the meetings to learn more, or join the SAFTE Coalition, please contact Jill at jpaperno@empirejustice.org. Best, Jill | |
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