In other news, the sky is blue, the Pope is Catholic, bears shit in the woods, and Ice Cube still hates Whitey.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police, but blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found.

Police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter, whether at a traffic stop or elsewhere, according to the Justice Department.

The study, released Sunday by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, covered police contacts with the public during 2005 and was based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people age 16 or over. (Read the full report)

"The numbers are very consistent" with those found in a similar study of police-public contacts in 2002, bureau statistician Matthew R. Durose, the report's co-author, said in an interview. "There's some stability in the findings over these three years."

Traffic stops have become a politically volatile issue. Minority groups have complained that many stops and searches are based on race rather than on legitimate suspicions. Blacks in particular have complained of being pulled over for simply "driving while black."

"The available data is sketchy but deeply concerning," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. The civil rights organization has done its own surveys of traffic stops, and he said the racial disparities grow larger, the deeper the studies delve.

A call for more data
"It's very important to look at the hit rates for searches -- the number that actually result in finding a crime," Shelton said. "There's a great deal of racial disparity there." He called for federal legislation that would collect uniform data by race on stops, arrests, use of force, searches and hit rates.

"This report shows there are still disturbing disparities in terms of what happens to people of color after the stop," said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's racial justice project.

He also said better reporting is needed.

Like the 2002 report, this one contained a warning that the racial disparities uncovered "do not constitute proof that police treat people differently along demographic lines" because the differences could be explained by circumstances not analyzed by the survey.

The 2002 report said such circumstances might include driver conduct or whether drugs were in plain view.

Traffic stops are the most frequent way police interact with the public, accounting for 41 percent of all contacts. An estimated 17.8 million drivers were stopped in 2005.

Black, Hispanic and white motorists were equally likely to be pulled over by police -- between 8 percent and 9 percent of each group. The slight decline in blacks pulled over -- from 9.2 percent in 2002 to 8.1 percent in 2005 -- was not statistically significant, Durose said, and could be the result of random differences.

The raw numbers
The racial disparities showed up after that point:


Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent). There were slight but statistically insignificant declines compared with the 2002 report in the percentages of blacks and Hispanics searched.


Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police officers.

People interviewed described police hitting, kicking, pushing, grabbing, pointing a gun or spraying pepper spray at them or threatening to do so. More than four of five felt the force used was excessive, but there were no statistically significant racial disparities among the people who felt that way.

Two years ago, the Bush administration's handling of the 2002 report and its finding of racial disparities generated considerable controversy.

Departing from normal practice, the earlier report was simply posted on the statistics bureau's Web site without any press release announcing it.

The bureau's director at the time, Lawrence A. Greenfeld, appointed by President Bush in 2001, wanted to publicize the racial disparities, but his superiors disagreed, according to a statistics bureau employee.

Greenfeld told his staff he was being moved to a new job following the dispute, according to this employee, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

Thats nothing new. I've been "pulled over" twice for just walking the streets, even in a business suit. Fucking cops.

I had two undercovers try to arrest me for "Jaywalking" because I was white in a Black neighborhood. They thought I was going to buy drugs. They were right. Fortunately, I hadn't copped anything yet.

When they present these studies it's always presumed that it's white racist cops picking on minorities. Obviously not all the police officers were white, but that seems to be the way it's played up (or it's just my white man's guilt blinding me). I think it's important to include the race ratios of the officers as well in these studies, but that rarely seems to happen because it doesn't fit in with the media's agenda.

King, you have a point. Some of the cops that have pulled me over have been black or Latino. I believe once they become police officers, they all act and behave they same. Similar to the cop from the beginning of Boyz N' Da Hood.Ironically, the only once who have treated me with respect have been Asian cops.

When I worked at Fed Ex, there was this white guy, who got accepted to the LAPD. He said he couldn't wait to become an officer so he can beat up and harrass Mexicans. I'm sure he's not the only one with feelings like that toward minorities. Its happened across the nation. He's just one that actually admitted it.

It's been awhile but I've seen some of the responses by police to these kinds of charges that boiled things down to a couple of things. First, the claim was that people "of color" tend to react differently to their authority and when faced with contempt for it, the result is pretty much what happens in every other pissing contest (be it corporate, public sector, politics, or everyday life). If you're hauling ass and get pulled over, following Chris Rock's guidelines probably won't hurt the outcome if this is the case.

Second, the other major theme that came up was that the disparity of treatment was the result of different circumstances. I'm not privy to all of them but the ones that came up the most were that some groups tend to think having insurance and a valid driving license is optional. Cops apparently think differently and the outcome causes substantive differences in the outcome of an encounter.

As part of a civics class I took years ago, we were required to read several of the studies on this topic too; while outdated by current standards, the explanations for the numbers were always lacking by both "sides" of the issue. The NAACP/ACLU/LULAC types always claimed racism as the first, second, and last reason for the disparity while the police groups always claimed methodological issues. Perhaps both sides were wrong?!?

No offense folks, but minorities are also the worst drivers.

Cops are more likely to pull over and harass minorities, because minorities are [statistically] more likely to commit crimes. Minorities are statistically more likely to commit crimes, because they're statistically more likely to live below the poverty level and suffer from unemployment and lack of education. Minorities are statistically more likely to live below the poverty level because, historically, they've been denied equal opportunites in education and the workplace, and routinely suffer from the kind of discrimination that leads cops to pull them over for the color of their skin. And by assuming that these drivers are statistically more likely to be criminals based on their color [ rather than reason their way through the tiresome maze of social causes I just outlined ], these cops are just perpetuating a cycle of discrimination that breeds resentment and frustration in people who might otherwise feel a sense of moral obligation in a society that had invested a little more in their prosperity and well-being.
And although revealing the race of the cops doing the over-pulling might assuage some of that white man's guilt... all it really proves is that blacks and latinos are just as susceptible to racism as whites, and just as likely to discriminate against other blacks and latinos.

I was counting on this reaction, and I thank you all for the input. I'm proud of myself and my generation for being better than our predecessors when it comes to these issues, but the changes have come slowly and are distributed unevenly. Imagine how long such changes might take in other parts of the world, like say, Iraq? Thats another story.
Cops are cops, with all the tendencies of government employees, and with the burden of being a target on the front line against human weakness. I suppose it's been easy enough for me to stay clear of the fray being cracker white with a normal appearance, I've never been arrested. I do have a great deal of empathy for my countrymen who are liable to face this injustice every time they leave the house.

After reading Hyde's post I thought I was reading one of the approximately two dozen similar threads on ADT.