Cai William, Gaebler Johann, Kaashoek Justin, Pinals Lisa, Madden Samuel, Goel Sharad
Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2022 Jul 30;1(4):pgac144. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac144. eCollection 2022 Sep.
Past studies have found that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than White drivers to be pulled over by the police for alleged traffic infractions, including a combination of speeding and equipment violations. It has been difficult, though, to measure the extent to which these disparities stem from discriminatory enforcement rather than from differences in offense rates. Here, in the context of speeding enforcement, we address this challenge by leveraging a novel source of data, which include second-by-second driving speed for hundreds of thousands of individuals in 10 major cities across the United States. We find that time spent speeding is approximately uncorrelated with neighborhood demographics, yet, in several cities, officers focused speeding enforcement in small, demographically nonrepresentative areas. In some cities, speeding enforcement was concentrated in predominantly non-White neighborhoods, while, in others, enforcement was concentrated in predominately White neighborhoods. Averaging across the 10 cities we examined, and adjusting for observed speeding behavior, we find that speeding enforcement was moderately more concentrated in non-White neighborhoods. Our results show that current enforcement practices can lead to inequities across race and ethnicity.
过去的研究发现，与白人司机相比，少数族裔司机因涉嫌交通违法行为（包括超速和设备违规等多种行为）而被警察拦下的可能性更高。然而，要衡量这些差异在多大程度上源于歧视性执法而非犯罪率的差异一直很困难。在此，在超速执法的背景下，我们通过利用一种新的数据来源来应对这一挑战，这些数据包括美国10个主要城市中数十万人逐秒的驾驶速度。我们发现，超速行驶时间与社区人口统计数据几乎没有关联，然而，在几个城市中，警察将超速执法集中在人口统计学上不具代表性的小区域。在一些城市，超速执法集中在以非白人为主的社区，而在其他城市，执法则集中在以白人为主的社区。在我们研究的10个城市中进行平均，并对观察到的超速行为进行调整后，我们发现超速执法在非白人社区的集中程度略高。我们的结果表明，当前的执法做法可能导致种族和族裔间的不公平。
