The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought discussions of race and policing to the forefront in the summer of 2020 in the United States, spurring protests and calls for policing reform. However, enacting successful reforms curtailing racially biased policing requires understanding whether bias is widespread, likely tied to systemic sources, or the work of a few racist officers. This study elaborates on these perspectives by drawing on theories of systemic and individual bias that may arise when bureaucrats have ample discretion. Using millions of traffic stops, I construct two measures to evaluate whether disparities are widespread—as indicated by the first perspective—or confined to a few officers—as suggested by the second. This study finds widespread racial disparities in who is searched following a traffic stop and that banning consent searches would alter policing patterns more than eliminating outlier officers in a set of paired t-tests.

中文翻译：

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比较种族不同的交通停止结果的系统和个人来源

2020 年夏天，乔治·弗洛伊德 (George Floyd) 和布伦娜·泰勒 (Breonna Taylor) 的去世将种族和警务问题的讨论带到了美国的最前沿，引发了抗议和对警务改革的呼声。然而，要实施成功的改革以减少种族偏见的警务，需要了解偏见是否普遍存在，可能与系统性来源或少数种族主义官员的工作有关。本研究通过利用当官僚有足够的自由裁量权时可能出现的系统性和个人偏见的理论来详细阐述这些观点。使用数百万个交通站点，我构建了两个度量来评估差异是否广泛存在——如第一个观点所示——或仅限于少数官员——如第二个观点所示。