Multilevel Model of Racial Disparity in Traffic Enforcement

Abstract

Individual officer characteristics, attributes of the organization, and the racial threat thesis are all explored as possible contributors to the racial distribution of citations. Using Hierarchal Linear Modeling (HLM), the findings of the analyses suggest that less experienced officers and those officers working in patrol districts where members are more highly trained issue more African American citations than more experienced officers and officers working in patrol districts where members are less trained. The findings also indicate that the effect of length of service on the outcome measure varies by the officer's race. The racial threat analyses suggest that there is racial disparity in the issuance of citations and that the extent of the disparity steadily increases as the representation of African Americans in the driving population increases. The implications of this dissertation's findings for future research on the racial distribution of traffic enforcement outcomes are discussed.

Description

Keywords

racial profiling, traffic enforcement, policing, state law enforcement, DWB, driving while black,

Citation

Degree

PhD

Discipline

Sociology

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