Statistician addresses racial profiling

Although black drivers are more likely to be stopped by the police than white drivers, Gregory Ridgeway argues that this disparity does not necessarily result from racial bias.

In a politically charged discussion in the McNeil Building yesterday, Ridgeway, a senior statistician and the Director of the Safety and Justice research program at RAND, addressed this issue and others in a talk focused on racial profiling.

Racial profiling, Ridgeway explained, occurs when “officers use race as part of a crime-suspect description that is not appropriate.”

From the outset of the discussion, Ridgeway emphasized that the question today is not whether racial profiling is unconstitutional — it “is one of the ‘central evils’ that the 14th Amendment addresses,” he said.

Instead, he stressed, we need to figure out how and when racial profiling occurs.

In several recent studies in cities from Oakland, Calif. to Cincinnati, Ohio and New York City, Ridgeway discovered that blacks were more likely to be stopped on the road by police than whites, but this results from factors other than race bias. In Oakland, for instance, Ridgeway found that the driver’s time on the road and magnitude of police surveillance in the surrounding area were primary factors in the number of stops.

In Cincinnati, Ridgeway found that in many cases the reasons for disparities in stop duration related to invalid licenses and other factors besides race.

“That is not to say I never find problems,” Ridgeway said. “I always find problematic officers.”

He described a benchmarking system that he developed with the New York Police Department by which to detect officers that target black drivers based on race alone.

Ridgeway also emphasized that his data “does nothing to discredit individual stories with the police.” The main issue now, he said, is to identify problem officers and “squeeze the problem out of the system.”

Graduate student Allison Kanter said the talk was especially relevant because Penn’s Criminology program focuses on racial profiling in particular.

Undergraduate Chairman of Criminology John MacDonald agreed that the benefits of bringing Ridgeway to campus are numerous.

“It’s a good educational experience but also a public service to have him come,” he said. “We’re essentially in an urban environment in a city that has one of the highest homicide rates in the country … it seems to be natural that Penn should be focused on figuring out not just the science but also the social policy responses.”

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