DISPARITY FOLLOWS POLICE PULL-OVERS

Latinos, Blacks Searched More Than Whites Are

WASHINGTON -- Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to
be pulled over by police, but blacks and Hispanics are much more
likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found.

Police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks
and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter, whether at a
traffic stop or elsewhere, according to the Justice Department.

The study, released Sunday by the department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics, covered police contacts with the public in 2005 and was
based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people
age 16 or over. Traffic stops have become a politically volatile
issue. Minority groups have complained that many stops and searches
are based on race rather than on legitimate suspicions. Blacks in
particular have complained of being pulled over for simply "driving
while black."

"The available data is sketchy but deeply concerning," said Hilary
Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. The civil rights
organization has done its own surveys of traffic stops, and he said
the racial disparities grow larger, the deeper the studies delve.

"It's very important to look at the hit rates for searches; the
number that actually result in finding a crime," Shelton said.
"There's a great deal of racial disparity there." He called for
federal legislation that would collect uniform data by race on stops,
arrests, use of force, searches and hit rates. "This report shows
there are still disturbing disparities in terms of what happens to
people of color after the stop," said Dennis Parker, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union's racial justice project. He also said
better reporting is needed.

The numbers are very consistent with those found in a similar study
of police-public contacts in 2002, bureau statistician Matthew
Durose, the report's co-author, said in an interview. "There's some
stability in the findings over these three years."

Like the 2002 report, this one contained a warning that racial
disparities uncovered "do not constitute proof that police treat
people differently along demographic lines," because the differences
could be explained by circumstances not analyzed by the survey. The
2002 report said such circumstances might include driver conduct or
whether drugs were in plain view. Traffic stops are the most frequent
way police interact with the public, accounting for 41 percent of all
contacts. An estimated 17.8 million drivers were stopped in 2005.

Black, Hispanic and white motorists were equally likely to be pulled
over by police -- between 8 percent and 9 percent of each group. The
slight decline in blacks pulled over, from 9.2 percent in 2002 to 8.1
percent in 2005, was not statistically significant, Durose said, and
could be the result of random differences.

The racial disparities showed up after that point: Blacks (9.5
percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be
searched than whites (3.6 percent). There were slight but
statistically insignificant declines, compared with the 2002 report
in the percentages of blacks and Hispanics searched.

Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1
percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent
of the time. Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6
percent of the time. But blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3
percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected
to force or the threat of force by police officers.

People interviewed described police hitting, kicking, pushing,
grabbing, pointing a gun or spraying pepper spray at them or
threatening to do so. More than four of five felt the force used was
excessive, but there were no statistically significant racial
disparities among the people who felt that way. About Charlotte The
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department commissioned a study,
released in 2004, that found no evidence of widespread bias among
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers regarding the people they pull over.