Date: Thursday 11th June 2015
Policy Scotland would like to invite you to our second Annual Lecture with guest speaker, Professor Frank Baumgartner.
Frank holds the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professorship of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US). His research focuses on public policy, agenda-setting, and interest groups/lobbying, and has been roughly equally focused on US and western European applications.
Abstract
US politics has recently been focused on the apparent distrust between communities of color and their local police, with events in Ferguson Missouri, Baltimore, and elsewhere seemingly multiplying in a sudden discovery of bad relations between police and the communities they serve.
Based on the largest available data collection on police traffic stops across the state of North Carolina (2002 through the present, with over 18 million observations), I compare the rate at which Black and White drivers are searched or arrested, following a traffic stop. Disparities are not only large, but they have been growing over time.
The data suggest that concerns within minority communities about differential policing practices are not only well justified, but they are not limited to a small number of municipalities; rather they are a large and growing part of US policing more generally.
