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May 4, 2006

Study cites progress in reducing racial profiling

PROVIDENCE -- Rhode Island police have made some progress in reducing differences in the way they treat minority drivers, a new state racial profiling study released today says.

However, the police continued to both stop and search non-whites more often than whites.

Non-whites were about twice as likely to be searched as non-whites.

Meanwhile, the police continued to find contraband more often in vehicles
driven by whites. Contraband included mostly drugs, alcohol and guns.

Much of the improvement from the previous study, completed in 2003,
came in the way police searched the vehicles of different racial and ethnic
groups. The study said that three quarters of the municipal police
departments and two of the six state police barracks reduced the disparity
between white and non-white searches.

Read an executive summary of the report.

-- Journal staff writer Bruce Landis

The study's authors, experts from Northeastern University's Institute on Race and Justice, said that "represents a dramatic improvement."

Since the previous study, 14 police departments reduced the disparity between non-white stops and the number of non-whites in the driving population, but the disparity increased in 13 other jurisdictions, the study said. The change in the other 12 jurisdictions was negligible, it said.

The new study covers data on 288,483 traffic stops by every police department in the state during the year ending Sept. 30, 2005. All municipal police and the state police were supposed to fill out a data card each time they stopped a vehicle. The information included the race of the driver, the reason for the stop and whether a search was conducted.

-- Journal staff writer Bruce Landis

Posted by Jack Perry at 11:28 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2006

Study cites progress in reducing racial profiling

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