Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A sizeable amount of evidence suggests that police in the United States tend to stop racial and ethnic minorities more often than whites. Such disparities also occur in the context of post-stop enforcement. These findings hold even after accounting for variation in precinct characteristics and race-specific estimates of participation in criminal activity. Less is known, however, about potentially mitigating factors that may reduce racial disparities after the stop is made, such as the decision to search subjects for weapons, hit rates, use of force, and final stop resolution. In this paper, we analyze data from 13,000 pedestrian stops by the Seattle Police Department over a 19-month period (July 2015 - January 2017) to test for situational, environmental, and time-related factors that mitigate racial disparity in post-stop outcomes. Among the variables of interest are the number of police officers present during the stop, the sex and race of reporting police officers, time of day, and the surroundings of where the stop was made