Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:50:01.637Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fiscal Pressures and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2020

Allison P. Harris Open the ORCID record for Allison P. Harris [Opens in a new window] ,
Elliott Ash Open the ORCID record for Elliott Ash [Opens in a new window]  and
Jeffrey Fagan
Allison P. Harris*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Elliott Ash
Affiliation:
ETH Zurich
Jeffrey Fagan
Affiliation:
Columbia University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Allison P. Harris, Yale University, New Haven, Ct, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

This paper provides evidence of racial variation in traffic enforcement responses to local government budget stress using data from policing agencies in the state of Missouri from 2001 through 2012. Like previous studies, we find that local budget stress is associated with higher citation rates; we also find an increase in traffic-stop arrest rates. However, we find that these effects are concentrated among White (rather than Black or Latino) drivers. The results are robust to the inclusion of a range of covariates and a variety of model specifications, including a regression discontinuity examining bare budget shortfalls. Considering potential mechanisms, we find that targeting of White drivers is higher where the White-to-Black income ratio is higher, consistent with the targeting of drivers who are better able to pay fines. Further, the relative effect on White drivers is higher in areas with statistical over-policing of Black drivers: when Black drivers are already getting too many fines, police cite White drivers from whom they are presumably more likely to be able to raise the needed extra revenue. These results highlight the relationship between policing-as-taxation and racial inequality in policing outcomes.

Keywords

policingtraffic stopsdiscriminationbudgetslocal budgetsbudgetaryshortfallsracial discrimination
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 5 , Special Issue 3: Race and Criminal Justice , November 2020 , pp. 450 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Baicker, Katherine, and Jacobson, Mireille. 2007. “Finders Keepers: Forfeiture Laws, Policing Incentives, and Local Budgets.” Journal of Public Economics 91 (11): 2113–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bannon, Alicia, Nagrecha, Mitali, and Diller, Rebekah. 2010. Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry. Report from Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, https://www.criminallegalnews.org/media/publications/brennan_center_for_justice_reentry_report_2010.pdfGoogle Scholar
Baumgartner, Frank R, Epp, Derek A, and Shoub, Kelsey. 2018. Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berdejo, Carlos, and Yuchtman, Noam. 2013. “Crime, Punishment, and Politics: An Analysis of Political Cycles in Criminal Sentencing.” Review of Economics and Statistics 95 (3): 741–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CEA. 2015. “Fines, Fees and Bail: Payments in the Criminal Justice System that Disproportionately Impact the Poor.” White House Council of Economic Advisers Issue Brief.Google Scholar
National Research Council. 2004. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.Google Scholar
Dippel, Christian, and Poyker, Michael. 2019. How Common are Electoral Cycles in Criminal Sentencing? Technical report National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DOJ. 2015. “Civil Rights Division Report on Ferguson Police Department.” U.S. Department of Justice.Google Scholar
Donohue, John J. III, and Levitt, Steven D.. 2001. “The Impact of Race on Policing and Arrests.” Journal of Law and Economics 44 (2): 367–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epp, Charles R, Maynard-Moody, Steven, and Haider-Markel, Donald P. 2014. Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fagan, Jeffrey, and Ash, Elliott. 2017. “New Policing, New Segregation? From Ferguson to New York.” Georgetown Law Journal 106: 33–134.Google Scholar
Fagan, Jeffrey A, Geller, Amanda, Davies, Garth, and West, Valerie. 2009. Race, Ethnicity, and Policing: New and Essential Readings. NYU Press chapter Street Stops and Broken Windows Revisited: the Demography and Logic of Proactive Policing in a Safe and Changing City, pp. 309–48.Google Scholar
Garrett, Thomas A, and Wagner, Gary A. 2009. “Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror: Local Fiscal Conditions and the Issuance of Traffic Tickets.” Journal of Law and Economics 52 (1): 71–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geller, Amanda, Fagan, Jeffrey, Tyler, Tom, and Link, Bruce G. 2014. “Aggressive Policing and the Mental Health of Young Urban Men.” American Journal of Public Health 104 (12): 2321–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goel, Sharad, Perelman, Maya, Shroff, Ravi, and Alan Sklansky, David. 2017. “Combatting Police Discrimination in the Age of Big Data.” New Criminal Law Review: In International and Interdisciplinary Journal 20 (2): 181–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldstein, Rebecca, Sances, Michael W, and You, Hye Young. 2018. “Exploitative Revenues, Law Enforcement, and the Quality of Government Service.” Urban Affairs Review 56 (1): 5–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Sanford C, and Huber, Gregory. 2007. “The Effect of Electoral Competitiveness on Incumbent Behavior.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2 (2): 107–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grogger, Jeffrey, and Ridgeway, Greg. 2006. “Testing for Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops from behind a Veil of Darkness.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 101 (475): 878–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gross, Samuel R, and Barnes, Katherine Y. 2002. “Road Work: Racial Profiling and Drug Interdiction on the Highway.” Michigan Law Review 101: 651.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harcourt, Bernard E. 2008. Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Harmon, Rachel A. 2012. “The Problem of Policing.” Michigan Law Review 110: 761–817.Google Scholar
Harris, Alexes. 2017. A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor. SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England.Google Scholar
Harris, David A. 1999. “Stories, the Statistics, and the Law: Why Driving While Black Matters.” Minnesota Law Review 84: 265.Google Scholar
Heriot, Gail. 2017. “Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ Report on Targeted Fines and Fees Against Communities of Color: Civil Rights and Constitutional Implications.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernández-Murillo, Rubén, and Knowles, John. 2004. “Racial Profiling or Racist Policing? Bounds Tests in Aggregate Data.” International Economic Review 45 (3): 959–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heymann, Philip B. 2000. “The New Policing.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 28: 407.Google Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth. 2016. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Randall. 1998. Race, Crime, and the Law. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Knowles, John, Persico, Nicola, and Todd, Petra. 2001. “Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence.” The Journal of Political Economy 109 (1): 203–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kubik, Jeffrey D, and Moran, John R. 2003. “Lethal Elections: Gubernatorial Politics and the Timing of Executions.” Journal of Law and Economics 46 (1): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, John, Fagan, Jeffrey, and Geller, Amanda. 2016. “The Effects of Local Police Surges on Crime and Arrests in New York City.” PLoS ONE 11 (6): e0157223.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Makowsky, Michael D, and Stratmann, Thomas. 2009. “Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?” American Economic Review 99 (1): 509–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makowsky, Michael D, Stratmann, Thomas, and Tabarrok, Alexander T.. 2018. “To Serve and Collect: The Fiscal and Racial Determinants of Law Enforcement.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Missouri. 2019. “2018 Vehicle Stops Executive Summary, Appendix B.”. URL: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/public-safety/2018appendixb.pdf?sfvrsn=2.Google Scholar
Park, Kyung H. 2017. “The Impact of Judicial Elections in the Sentencing of Black Crime.” Journal of Human Resources 52 (4): 998–1031.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, Karen P., Lane, Erin C, and Alpert, Geoffrey P. 2010. “Community Characteristics and Police Search Rates.” Race, Ethnicity, and Policing: New and Essential Readings. p. 349.Google Scholar
Persico, Nicola, and Todd, Petra. 2006. “Generalising the Hit Rates Test for Racial Bias in Law Enforcement, with an Application to Vehicle Searches in Wichita.” The Economic Journal 116 (515): F351–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierson, Emma, Simoiu, Camelia, Overgoor, Jan, Corbett-Davies, Sam, Ramachandran, Vignesh, Phillips, Cheryl, and Goel, Sharad. 2017. “A Large-Scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops across the United States.” arXiv preprint arXiv 1706: 05678.Google Scholar
The Stanford Open Policing Project. 2019. “The Stanford Open Policing Project.” URL: https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/.Google Scholar
Rojek, Jeff, Rosenfeld, Richard, and Decker, Scott. 2004. “The Influence of Driver's Race on Traffic Stops in Missouri.” Police Quarterly 7 (1): 126–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenfeld, Richard, Rojek, Jeff, and Decker, Scott. 2011. “Age Matters: Race Differences in Police Searches of Young and Older Male Drivers.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 49: 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowe, Brian. 2010. “Discretion and Ulterior Motives in Traffic Stops: The Detection of Other Crimes and the Revenue from Tickets.”Google Scholar
Shoub, Kelsey, Epp, Derek A, Baumgartner, Frank R, Christiani, Leah, and Roach, Kevin. 2020. “Race, Place, and Context: The Persistence of Race Effects in Traffic Stop Outcomes.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Sobol, Neil L. 2016. “Lessons Learned from Ferguson: Ending Abusive Collection of Criminal Justice Debt.” University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class 15 (2): 293–309.Google Scholar
Soss, Joe, and Weaver, Vesla. 2017. “Police are our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race–Class Subjugated Communities.” Annual Review of Political Science 20: 565–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Tom R, and Fagan, Jeffrey. 2008. “Legitimacy and Cooperation: Why Do People Help the Police Fight Crime in their Communities.” Ohio State Journal Criminal Law 6: 231.Google Scholar
Weaver, Vesla, Prowse, Gwen, and Piston, Spencer. 2020. “Withdrawing or Drawing In? Political Discourse in Policed Communities.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, James Q., and Kelling, George L.. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic Monthly 3: 29–38.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Harris et al. supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Harris et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 189.3 KB