Some Stats On Driving While Black

From the book Suspect Citizens.

Every black man, eventually. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Yesterday, I argued that one way to stop police brutality is to stop the stops. The harassment of African-American citizens, based on the flimsiest excuses for probable cause, is what allows police to subsequently beat, murder, and terrorize the black community.

You should read the piece — traffic says you didn’t yesterday — I’ll wait.

Anyway, today the Washington Post is running a Q&A with Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp, and Kelsey Shoub. They are the authors of a book called Suspect Citizens, which analyzed some 20 million traffic stops.

I haven’t read it, but I did just buy it (Prime Day, y’all). Because this stat from the Post is entirely consistent with everything I know:

We found that, compared to their share in the population, blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average, by the way. We also discovered that blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop. Just by getting in a car, a black driver has about twice the odds of being pulled over, and about four times the odds of being searched. Hispanic drivers, overall, are no more likely than whites to be pulled over, but much more likely to be searched…

African Americans are much more likely to be searched after a stop than white drivers, but less likely to be found with drugs, guns, alcohol or other forms of contraband after discretionary searches. Hispanic drivers in particular are much less likely to be found with contraband after a search, compared to whites.

“Driving while black” is not a hallucination of the African-American mind. We’re not making it up. We’re not suffering from a persecution complex. We’re not being paranoid. We’re not playing the race card. We’re not playing the victim card. We’re not unwilling to “get over” slavery.

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WE’RE BEING FUCKING HUNTED.


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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