Traffic stops, race, and perceptions of fairness

ABSTRACT

Traffic stops are the most common reason for face-to-face encounters between police officers and citizens. Contact with police can affect citizens’ behaviour toward the police, particularly when citizens perceive unfair treatment by officers during these encounters. Yet, few studies have examined how experiencing a traffic stop affects citizens’ decisions to seek assistance from police or report non-crime emergencies. This study analysed data from the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS) to examine (a) the relationship between experiencing traffic stops and calling police for help and/or to report non-crime emergencies and (b) why perceptions of fairness and reasons for the traffic stop might affect these outcomes across different racial/ethnic categories. Results from multivariate logistic regression models show that citizens stopped for traffic violations are significantly less likely to seek help from the police and/or to report non-crime emergencies compared to those with other types of face-to-face police contacts. Additionally, those who perceived unfair treatment during traffic stops were less likely to report non-crime emergencies compared to those who felt the police treated them fairly. The effects of perception of fairness and the reason for a stop on reporting non-crime emergencies were significantly different among Hispanic citizens compared to White citizens. Policy implications of the results are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Traffic stops
• police officers
• procedural justice
• non-crime emergencies
• race/ethnicity

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Professors Sam Walker, the Late Benjamin Steiner, Pauline Brennan, Starr Solomon and Jason Rydberg for their intuitive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The PPCS involved a complex sampling design; however, weights were created to reflect the inverse of each participant’s odds of selection (Lohr 1999). The weights were normalised and applied to the analyses reported in this study.

2 The data used for this study is comprised of information gathered on all citizens who indicated that they had a face-to-face contact with the police in the 2011 version of the PPCS survey (n = 10,620). Respondents who were not White, Black, or Hispanic were excluded from the analyses (n = 564), therefore the final total sample was comprised of 10,056 White, Black, and Hispanic individuals with face-to-face encounters.

3 Calls for help refer to calling the police to report crime and reporting non-crime emergencies refers to service calls. This is how these variables are labelled in the PPCS.

4 2013 NCVS estimates that only about 46 percent of violent victimizations are reported to the police-refer to Criminal Victimization, 2013 by Jennifer L. Truman, Ph.D., and Lynn Langton, Ph.D., BJS Statisticians.

5 The cross-sectional nature of the PPCS data makes it difficult to assess the causal ordering of the dependent and independent variables. In other words, it may be impossible to determine whether citizens called the police prior to experiencing face-to-face contacts with the police or after they experienced these stops.

6 Recall that odds ratios that range from 0 to 1 represent inverse relationships between predictor variables and outcomes, 1 indicates no real relationship between predictor and outcome variables, scores below 1 indicate negative relationships, and scores above 1 indicate positive relationships between predictors and outcome variables.