Suspect Citizens
What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race

The costs of racially disparate patterns of police behavior are high, but the crime fighting benefits are low.

Frank R. Baumgartner (Author), Derek A. Epp (Author), Kelsey Shoub (Author)

9781108429313, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 July 2018

292 pages, 33 b/w illus. 40 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.52 kg

'Suspect Citizens, written by a distinguished team of political scientists, delivers on that promise by providing an extraordinary study of racial profiling in North Carolina using the state's mandated traffic stop database. In the era of big data policing, Baumgartner, Epp, and Shoub demonstrate the value of data mining police practices to reveal racial disparities in 20 million recorded traffic stops between 2002 and 2016 … The book is an important historical and contemporary window into one state's experience with one of the so-called remedies advocated by social scientists, police practitioners, and politicians in the late 1990s to reduce racial profiling by the police.' Albert J. Meehan, American Journal of Sociology

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated.

1. Suspect citizens: fighting the war on crime with traffic stops
2. A legislative mandate to address concerns about racial profiling
3. Who gets stopped?
4. What happens after a stop?
5. Finding contraband
6. Search and arrest patterns by officer and agency
7. Profiling Hispanics, profiling blacks
8. Black political power and disparities in policing
9. Reforms that reduce alienation and enhance community safety
10. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Criminology: legal aspects [LAR], Law & society [LAQ], Law [L], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB], Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies [JFSL1], Social interaction [JFFP], Social discrimination & inequality [JFFJ], Social issues & processes [JFF]