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Law, Probability and Risk Advance Access originally published online on June 12, 2009
Law, Probability and Risk 2009 8(2):139-152; doi:10.1093/lpr/mgp014
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Are blacks egregious speeding violators at extraordinary rates in New Jersey?{dagger}

Joseph B. Kadane*

Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences, Emeritus, Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

John Lamberth

Lamberth Consulting 20 W. Miner St, West Chester, PA 19382, USA

* Email: kadane{at}stat.cmu.edu

Received on 16 February 2009. Revised on 28 April 2009. Accepted on 29 April 2009.


  Abstract

In 1996, a New Jersey Court found that the New Jersey State Police engaged in targeting black motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike (NJT), intensifying the debate around racial profiling. Two recent articles have claimed that the standard of comparison for determining racial profiling was incorrect because either the measurements utilized to make that determination or the standard used in Soto were wrong. The present article concludes that the measures used in the Soto case were valid and reliable. It presents two experiments that show that the suggestion that blacks are stopped at about the correct rate on the NJT because they egregiously violate speed laws much more frequently than do whites is erroneous. The data are consistent with the use of racially informed traffic stops as a pretext for drug searches on the southern end of NJT.

Keywords: racial disparity; differential enforcement

{dagger} Presented at a workshop held at George Washington University, August 1st 2009, in honour of the 70th birthday of Joe Gastwirth, one of the founding editors of Law, Probability and Risk.


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