John Lott has expanded his previous discussion in the New York Post with some additional data that he didn’t have room for in that piece.
As President Obama asserted last Thursday:
“There was a whole structure (in Ferguson), according to the Justice Department report, that indicated both racism and just a disregard for what law enforcement’s supposed to do. … It is not unique, but it’s also not the norm.”
Even some conservatives condemned the Ferguson police department.
“It is disgusting,” said Karl Rove, and Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard called it “deeply troubling. And I think everybody should be troubled, blacks, whites, Republicans, Democrats.”
Within days, Ferguson’s police chief as well as the city manager resigned. And a recall campaign was launched against the mayor.
No doubt, racism can be a serious problem and should not be tolerated. But we should also be very careful when looking at the evidence before jumping to conclusions. People’s lives can be destroyed by baseless accusations.
Mere differences in traffic stops or warrants being issued isn’t evidence that people are being treated differently, let alone evidence of discrimination.
Misleading Data
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey, men are 42% more likely than women to be pulled over for traffic stops. We could argue that men are being discriminated against. Yet it seems generally accepted that men simply break the rules more often. The difference has nothing to do with treating people differently or discrimination.
Take the first claim in the report:
“Ferguson’s law-enforcement practices overwhelmingly impact African-Americans. Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African-Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson’s population.”
But even these numbers are very misleading. The people who drive in Ferguson aren’t all from Ferguson.
Indeed, the seven cities that border Ferguson have an average black population of 80.3%.
Some members of the local media, such as McGraw Milhaven, program director at KTRS-AM, claim that Ferguson isn’t going after blacks for traffic violations but those who live in other cities. They want non-Ferguson citizens to pay its taxes, and it just so happens that over 80% of those people are black.
All the Obama administration’s report had to do in its empirical work was account for where drivers live, but it doesn’t do that.
Using just Ferguson’s population is misleading for another reason. Nationwide, blacks were 31% more likely than whites to be pulled over for a traffic stop. If Ferguson’s blacks were pulled over at the same rate as blacks nationally, they’d account for 87.5% of traffic stops, more than the 85% they do.
Critics may assert that “31% more likely” figure simply shows that racism is endemic to police forces nationwide. But wasn’t the whole point to say, as Obama claimed, that Ferguson is worse, not better, than the rest of the country?
Lacking Transparency
The administration also charged that blacks were treated worse after being pulled over for a traffic violation:
“African-Americans account for 72% of citations based on radar or laser, but 80% of citations based on other or unspecified methods. Thus, as evaluated by radar, African-Americans violate the law at lower rates than as evaluated by FPD officers.”
But again, these results could easily be explained if Ferguson used radar detectors on those roads that are primarily used by its citizens and other methods where primarily non-Ferguson residents are affected.
This failure even to try accounting for simple explanations that have nothing to do with racism is seen throughout the report. For example, blacks are more likely to be searched when they are stopped for traffic violations even after driver age, gender, the officer making the stop, and the reason for the stop (e.g., speeding) are taken into account.
But officers are given a lot more information than that about the driver when they pull them over, such as outstanding arrest warrants and past criminal and driving record. Is it that hard to believe you’re more likely to search someone who has an arrest warrant out for them? Why not account for that other information that police have?
The Obama report is also quite secretive on its evidence — not showing empirical tests or releasing data.
Obama couldn’t simply express anger over the shooting of two Ferguson police officers without first qualifying it with “whoever fired those shots shouldn’t detract from the issue (of racism in Ferguson).” For an administration so quick to claim racism, cherry-picked data that doesn’t try to address even simple alternative explanations is not very convincing.
I found the Red State article by Leon Wolf, “Many Conservatives Are Blowing It on the Ferguson DOJ Report” really disturbing. http://www.redstate.com/2015/03/15/many-conservatives-blowing-it-ferguson-doj-report/
It paints a very troubling portrait of bad, corrupt revenue-based police department that served as a money machine for city coffers. Racist or not, it should not be tolerated by citizens. I would appreciate Dr. Lott’s take on Wolf’s article.