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49 Law & Soc'y Rev. 279 (2015)
Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider Markel

handle is hein.journals/lwsocrw49 and id is 283 raw text is: 



Book Reviews

Jinee Lokaneeta, Editor





Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. By
    Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider
    Markel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 272 pp.
    25.00 paperback.

Reviewed by Mario L. Barnes, School of Law, University of California,
Irvine



It is rare to read a new book that makes important contributions to
multiple fields and literatures. It is rarer still when the book
addresses the interrelation of race, perceived criminality, and
policing-historically fraught affiliations that remain so despite
being extensively explored within law and social science research.
In Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, the
authors make these important contributions. In the narrowest
sense, the book analyzes a survey of over 2300 motorists about
their experiences with traffic stops in the Kansas City Metropolitan
area. The findings, however, do much more. They differentiate
between stops where race does or does not provide the basis for
the encounter and in so doing, utilize methods that are attendant
to both critical and sociolegal approaches. As a result, the text
offers crucial insights into how race shapes and is shaped by police
stops in often hidden and subtle but profound and foundational
ways (p. xvi).
    The book importantly illustrates that police stops work differ-
ently depending on the justification for the stop. There are traffic
safety stops, which officers identify as premised on must-stop vio-
lations (p. 60), and there are investigatory stops, which are used to
address low-level violations. In assessing the likelihood of a driver
being stopped, the researchers assessed stops for excessive speeding
(one type of traffic safety stop), traffic safety stops more generally,
and investigatory stops. Across these stops, they evaluated a number
of characteristics of the drivers and vehicles driven. These charac-
teristics included whether drivers were African American, gender,
age, vehicle value, vehicle type (luxury cars), and vehicle damage.
The research revealed that African Americans are much less likely

Law & Society Review, Volume 49, Number 1 (2015)
© 2015 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

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