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7 Police Q. 3 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/policqurt7 and id is 1 raw text is: 















LOOKING FOR THE DRIVING WHILE

BLACK PHENOMENA: CONCEPTUALIZING

RACIAL BIAS PROCESSES AND

THEIR ASSOCIATED DISTRIBUTIONS


DONALD  TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY
North Carolina State University
MARCINDA  MASON
University of the Virgin Islands
MATTHEW   ZINGRAFF
North Carolina State University



   This article describes four bias mechanisms that might produce the driving
   while Black phenomena. First, some officers may be racially prejudiced and
   so consciously target minority drivers. Second, most officers have access to
   cultural stereotypes and their associated cognitive biases. This mechanism
   will produce a diffuse tendency to stop minority drivers at higher rates than
   majority drivers. This bias mechanism should be present among both minor-
   ity and majority officers but operate more strongly on average for majority
   officers. Racial profiling, the organizational practice ofstopping individuals
   because they fit a profile that includes race/ethnic characteristics, will
   produce racial bias in stops at very high rates among both majority and
   minority officers. Finally, if the police are deployed more heavily in minority
   communities, this will also produce high rates of minority stops. Neither
   organizational mechanism requires any bias in officer or organizational
   intent, although they will produce biased policing.

   Keywords:  racial profiling; racism; cognitive bias; vehicle stops; neigh-
              borhood policing; baseline estimators



For the past several decades, discretionary decision making within the crim-
inal justice system has received wide attention from criminal justice policy

POLICE QUARTERLY Vol. 7 No. 1, March 2004 3-29
DOI: 10.1177/1098611103259858
© 2004 Sage Publications

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