Police discretion, organizational characteristics, and traffic stops: An analysis of racial disparity in illinois
| Author | Tyrell Spencer,Jeffrey S. Nowacki |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1461355719832617 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Police discretion, organizational
characteristics, and traffic stops:
An analysis of racial disparity in illinois
Jeffrey S. Nowacki
Colorado State University, USA
Tyrell Spencer
Southern Illinois University, USA
Abstract
An important source of racial disparity in policing is traffic enforcement. The level of discretion afforded to officers for
traffic enforcement is generally greater than it is for other policing decisions. One way to control misuse of discretion is
through minority representation, which is the extent that the racial composition of the police agency matches that of the
local community. Using data from the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the 2013 Law Enforcement
Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), this study examines how social context and police organizational
variables (e.g., minority representation) relate to enforcement outcomes. We find that organizational measures, including
minority representation, relate to written citations and consent search requests. Moreover, non-white population size
conditions the effect of minority representation on traffic stops and citations. These results highlight the importance of
accounting for both s ocial context and orga nizational charac teristics when resea rch examines discre tionary police
behavior.
Keywords
Traffic stops, police organizations, racial disparity, minority representation, minority-group threat
Submitted 24 Sep 2018, Revise received 10 Dec 2018, accepted 31 Jan 2019
Police action is guided by the decision-making flexibility
available to officers. Although this flexibility, or discretion,
is vital to the police role, it also has the potential to produce
inequities among citizens. One avenue for these inequities
to emerge is through traffic stop decisions. The perception
of disparity in traffic enforcement decisions has allowed
phrases such as “driving while black” to become popular
(Lundman and Kaufman, 2003; Schafer et al., 2006), sug-
gesting that non-white drivers are at elevated risk for stops,
which can lead to further coercive police response.
Although discretionary behavior is often attribu ted to
individual officers, it is important to understand that dis-
cretion is filtered through the context of the police agency
where the officer is employe d, as well as the setting in
which police work is done. As such, studies of police dis-
cretion must focus on not only police officers, but also
police organizations and social structure (see Brooks,
2015). Variables such as department size, complexity of
the department, and the racial and ethnic make-up of the
officers can all influence discretionary decisions, as can
social characteristics, such as local crime rates, measures
of socio-economic status, and aggregate-level racial com-
position (Eitle et al., 2005; Jacobs and O’Brien, 1998;
Nowacki, 2015).
The racial and/or ethnic composition of a police agency
may be particularly important for understanding racial and
ethnic disparities in police outcomes (see Eitle et al., 2005).
Corresponding author:
Jeffrey S. Nowacki, Department of Sociology, Colorado State University,
B258 Clark Building, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1784, USA.
Email: Jeffrey.Nowacki@colostate.edu
International Journalof
Police Science & Management
2019, Vol. 21(1) 4–16
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1461355719832617
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