Racial Bias in Policing — Traffic Tickets and Officer Leniency

A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing. Felipe Goncalves and Steven Mello. Nov 2017. http://www.princeton.edu/~fmg/JMP

Abstract: We estimate the degree to which individual police o cers practice racial discrimination. Traffic police regularly discount the charged speed on drivers’ tickets to avoid a discrete jump in the fine schedule. This behavior leads to an excess mass in the distribution of charged speeds just below the jump. Using a bunching estimation design and data from the Florida Highway Patrol, we show that minorities are less likely to receive this break than white drivers. We disaggregate to the individual police officer level and find significant heterogeneity across o cers in their degree of discrimination, with 40% of officers explaining the entirety of the aggregate discrimination. Our measure of discrimination is easy to calculate and can be used by police departments as part of an early warning system. Using a simple personnel policy that reassigns officers across locations based on their lenience, departments can effectively reduce the aggregate disparity in treatment.

JEL Classification: J71, K42
Keywords: Discrimination, Racial Bias, Police, Traffic Enforcement.