Characterizing patterns in police stops by race in Minneapolis from 2016 to 2021

Abstract

The murder of George Floyd centered Minneapolis, Minnesota, in conversations on racial injustice in the US. We leverage open data from the Minneapolis Police Department to analyze individual, geographic, and temporal patterns in more than 170,000 police stops since 2016. We evaluate person and vehicle searches at the individual level by race using generalized estimating equations with neighborhood clustering, directly addressing neighborhood differences in police activity. Minneapolis exhibits clear patterns of disproportionate policing by race, wherein Black people are searched at higher rates compared to White people. Temporal visualizations indicate that police stops declined following the murder of George Floyd. This analysis provides contemporary evidence on the state of policing for a major metropolitan area in the United States.

Keywords:

• Police stops and searches
• race
• racial bias
• clustered data
• generalized estimating equations

Conflict of interest statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 In addition to George Floyd and Philando Castile, several police-involved shootings in the Minneapolis area have drawn intense media coverage and controversy. Recent examples include the shooting of Jamar Clark, Justine Damond, and Thurman Blevins to name just a few incidents from Minneapolis alone.

2 We use the term Indigenous and Indigenous people(s) throughout the manuscript as this recognizes the independence and original inhabitance of Indigenous peoples throughout the North American continent. Indigenous peoples are coded as “Native American” in the Minneapolis Police Stop dataset.

3 Readers interested in more extensive literature reviews on racial bias and disparities in traffic stops should look to both Roh and Robinson (see section “Literature Review”) and Gorsuch and Rho 2019 (see section “Background – Disparities in Police Stops and Their Effects”) (Gorsuch & Rho, 2019; Roh & Robinson, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

E Rose is a postdoctoral fellow supported the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 MH114873. EEM Moodie acknowledges the support of a chercheur de mérite career award from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Santé and a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1). T Onookome-Okome, J Gorondonsky, J Sauer, and K Lum received no external funding for participating in this research.