Reconstructing Law on the Street: The Influence of Citizen Characteristics on Traffic Law Enforcement

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A growing body of scholarship suggests that policies adopted by legislatures, executives, and public bureaucracies are revised, even transformed, through the discretionary actions of front-line public officials such as social workers, tax auditors, and police officers. The PIs will examine the transformation of the policy of the traffic stop and citation by front-line law enforcement officers. Traffic stops and citations are widespread, and there is growing evidence that they disproportionately affect racial minorities. Thus, traffic stops offer a direct and focused opportunity to assess the effects of citizens' personal characteristics on street-level law enforcement. The PIs will test several hypotheses concerning how drivers' race, sex, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics influence the likelihood that police officers will stop and ticket them. They will also examine whether oversight policies-namely, that police officers must record and report the race of drivers whom they stop-result in lower racial disparities in jurisdictions with such policies. Lastly, the investigators will test several hypotheses that address whether discretionary actions of street-level bureaucrats are significantly influenced by the value of equal enforcement of the law. . The research had the potential to contribute to literatures on bureaucratic discretion, political oversight, policing, and urban politics and policy and to the policy debate over racial profiling and police practices.The research team will conduct a telephone survey of a stratified random sample of African-American and white adult driers who are residents of the Kansas City metro area (in both Kansas and Missouri), with an over-sampling of African-Americans and of drivers who have been stooped in the last years. This sampling frame offers substantial variation to on key variables. For example, residents of Kansas City vary on key personal characteristics and driving habits, and the level of personal-agent oversight varies in the two states. That is, the state of Missouri and two Kansas metro municipalities require officers to record and report the race of the driver in all stopped vehicles; other Kansas City jurisdictions do not have this requirement.