Cops Furious Over Not-So-Radical Police Reform
THE STATISTICAL DIFFERENCE IN PRETEXTUAL STOPS … AND DEATH BY COP
“ Each of these incidents involved a pretextual traffic stop–when police officers use relatively minor offenses as a reason to conduct a traffic stop. According to the Stanford Open Policing Project–the largest study on police stops in history–Black drivers are more likely to be pulled over by police officers and one-and-a-half to two times more likely to be searched. “When we apply the threshold test to our traffic stop data, we find that police require less suspicion to search Black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers,” researchers noted. “This double standard is evidence of discrimination.”
It’s worse in Minnesota. In Minneapolis, a city that is 19.2 percent Black, African American drivers account for almost 80 percent of routine traffic stops, and were searched at 29 times the rate of white drivers. Perhaps that’s why officers in the Minneapolis Police Department choked Black people unconscious at six times the rate of whites. Maybe that is why, over the last twenty years, law enforcement officers in the state killed Black people at 5.6 times the rate of white Minnesotans.
