Greg Ridgeway
Senior Statistician
Acting Director, RAND Safety & Justice Research Program
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Title: Racial Profiling Analysis

Abstract: Several studies and high profile incidents around the nation involving police and minorities have brought the issue of racial profiling to national attention. While civil rights issues continue to arise in other areas such as offers of employment, job promotions, and school admissions, the issue of race disparities in traffic stops seems to have garnered much attention in recent years. Many communities, and at times the U.S. Department of Justice, have asked law enforcement agencies to collect and analyze data on all traffic stops. Data collection efforts, however, so far have outpaced the development of methods that can isolate the effect of race bias on officers' decisions to stop, cite, or search motorists.

In this talk I will describe a test for detecting race bias in the decision to stop a driver that does not require explicit, external
estimates of the driver risk set. Second, I'll describe an internal benchmarking methodology for identifying potential problem officers.
Lastly, I will describe methods for assessing racial disparities in citation, searches, and stop duration. I will present results from my
studies of the Oakland (CA), Cincinnati, and New York City Police Departments.

Bio: Greg Ridgeway (Ph.D. Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle) is a Senior Statistician at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA and is the Acting Director of RAND's Safety and Justice Research Program and Director of RAND's Center on Quality Policing, charged with managing RAND's portfolio of work on policing, crime prevention, courts, corrections, and public and occupational safety. His applied research has addressed illegal firearm markets, gang formation, drug treatment programs, racial profiling, and policing. In 2005, he received a commendation from the ATF Los Angeles Field Division and the Attorney General of California for "Contributions to Reducing Firearms Related Crimes in Los Angeles." In 2007 his paper with Jeff Grogger on a test
for racial bias in traffic stops received the American Statistical Association's Outstanding Statistical Application Award.