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‘Driving While Black’ Is a Real Issue
Analysis of millions of traffic stops reveals that racial disparities are indeed a serious problem nationwide
Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a book co-authored by Kelsey Shoub, currently on the political science faculty of the University of South Carolina. She and her co-authors analyzed 14 years of traffic stop data in the State of North Carolina after a mandate from the state legislature to gather information intended to either confirm or refute reported racial disparities in traffic stops.
Although the main data collection took place in North Carolina, Shoub says that her takeaways from the study were definitive, “The first is that ‘driving while black’ is very much a thing; it’s everywhere and it’s not just a North Carolina or a Southern problem but across the United States,” Shoub says. “The second thing is that it appears to be more systemic than a few ‘bad apple’ officers engaged in racial profiling.”
Shoub and her co-authors also gathered and analyzed traffic stop data from law enforcement agencies in 16 other states, including Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and Vermont that pointed to similar disparities as those identified in North Carolina in the rate at…
