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https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/883366/download
The database we created from hard copy stop reports reveals that BPD officers search African Americans at disproportionate rates. During pedestrian stops, officers searched 13 percent of African Americans compared to only 9.5 percent of other people—making African Americans 37 percent more likely to be searched when stopped than other residents. Similarly, officers were 23 percent more likely to search African Americans during vehicle stops. These differences are significant beyond conventional levels of statistical significance.
Justice Department experts found that racial disparities in search rates persisted after using regression techniques to control for relevant variables, including the area in which a stop occurred and the assignment and experience level of the officers involved.
These racial disparities suggest that BPD’s search practices discriminate against African Americans. Search rate differences do not alone establish disproportionate impact based on race, however, because it is possible that differential search rates are driven by race-neutral explanations. For that reason, the best measure of racial patterns in searches is a comparison of the rates at which officers find contraband during searches, or “hit rates.” See, e.g., John Knowles, Nicola Persico & Petra Todd, Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence, 109 JOURNAL OF POLITICALECONOMY 203 (2001). A lower hit rate for searches of a particular demographic group is evidence that officers apply a lower threshold of su ion when deciding to search members of that group compared to others.
To the extent that BPD collects hit rate data, it suggests that officers’ search decisions are biased against African Americans. Indeed, BPD’s data on all stops from 2010–2015 shows that searches of African Americans have significantly lower hit rates than other searches. During vehicles tops, BPD officers reported finding some type of contraband less than half as often when searching African Americans—in only 3.9 percent of searches of African Americans, compared to 8.5 percent of other searches. Search hit rates during pedestrian stops also exhibited large disparities, with officers finding contraband in only 2.6 percent of African American searches compared to 3.9 percent for other searches—a 50 percent difference. These results are statistically significant.
Footnote:
61 This analysis is based on all 3,863 searches that BPD recorded for pedestrian stops and 1,495 searches recorded forvehicle stops from 2010–2015. As discussed above, these data likely fail to capture a significant number of searches thatBPD officers actually conducted during this period. The hit rates from these searches are nonetheless indicative of bias,however, because there is no reason to believe that there are systematic differences in how BPD records searchoutcomes based on the race of the person searched. In other words, BPD officers sometimes fail to record theirsearches at all. But when searches are recorded, there is no indication that officers change how they record the fruits ofthe search based on the race of the person searched. Nor does it appear that officers disproportionately record searches
