![]() That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. “There is no way to overstate the difficulty of that task,” Goel said.Ĭreating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. Goel and his collaborators, which included Ravi Shroff, a professor of applied statistics at New York University, spent years culling through the data, eliminating records that were incomplete or from the wrong time periods, to create the 95 million-record database that was the basis for their analysis. The paper culminates a five-year collaboration between Stanford’s Cheryl Phillips, a journalism lecturer whose graduate students obtained the raw data through public records requests, and Sharad Goel, a professor of management science and engineering whose computer science team organized and analyzed the data. ![]() “Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias, and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities,” the researchers write in the May 4th issue of Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers also examined a subset of data from Washington and Colorado, two states that legalized marijuana, and found that while this change resulted in fewer searches overall, and thus fewer searches of blacks and Hispanics, minorities were still more likely than whites to have their cars searched after a pull-over. The Stanford-led study also found that when drivers were pulled over, officers searched the cars of blacks and Hispanics more often than whites. ![]() ![]() That is one of several examples of systematic bias that emerged from a five-year study that analyzed 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018. As further evidence of bias in traffic stops, Stanford researchers find that while blacks tend to get pulled over more frequently than whites, the disparity lessens at night, when a “veil of darkness” hides their face. ![]()
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