Objectives

The existence of bias in law enforcement can be difficult to verify or disprove, in part because of the difficulty of finding a benchmark—an objective estimate of actual offenses committed by the studied population—that can be compared with police enforcement. In the current study, we propose and test a method for examining bias in enforcement of speeding offenses.

Method

Using all speeding tickets issued in Israel in 2013–2015, we compare speeding tickets generated by stationary automatic traffic cameras, which provide an objective estimate of speed offenses, with speeding tickets issued manually by police officers, based on drivers’ ethnicity with further distribution by gender and age.

Results

Initial findings indicate that, overall, speeding tickets issued by police officers in Israel are not biased based on drivers’ ethnicity.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between overrepresentation and bias in law enforcement, which sometimes seem to be blurred in the literature.

中文翻译：

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克服估算交通执法中的偏见的基准问题：使用自动交通执法摄像头

目标

执法中是否存在偏见可能很难得到核查或证明，部分原因是难以找到可以与警察执行进行比较的基准（对研究人群实施的实际犯罪的客观估计）。在当前的研究中，我们提出并测试了一种检查超速驾驶犯罪中的偏见的方法。

方法

使用2013-2015年在以色列发行的所有超速罚单，我们将固定式自动交通摄像头产生的超速罚单进行比较，该摄像头提供了对违法行为的客观估计，并由警察根据驾驶员的种族手动发行了超速罚单，并进一步分配了超速罚单。性别和年龄。

结果

初步调查结果表明，总体而言，以色列警察签发的超速驾驶罚单并没有因驾驶员的种族而有偏见。

结论

这项研究突出了区分执法中过度代表和偏见的重要性，这在文献中有时似乎是模糊的。