IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/34471.html

Racial Disparity in Police Stop and Searches in England and Wales

Author

Listed:
  • Borooah, Vani

Abstract

Data published by the United Kingdom's Ministry for Justice clearly shows that, compared to persons who were White, members of racial minorities in England, particularly Blacks, were far more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. The question is whether such racial disparity in stops and searches could be justified by racial disparities in offending? Or whether the disparity in stop and searches exceeded the disparity in offending? This paper proposes a method for measuring the amount of excess in racial disparity in police stop and searches. Using the most recently published Ministry of Justice data (for 2007/08) for Police Areas in England and Wales it concludes that while in several Areas there was no excess to racial disparity in police stop and searches, there was, on the basis of the methodology proposed in the paper, evidence of such excess in some Police Areas of England and Wales.

Suggested Citation

  • Borooah, Vani, 2010. "Racial Disparity in Police Stop and Searches in England and Wales," MPRA Paper 34471, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2011.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:34471
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/34471/1/MPRA_paper_34471.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Elmslie, Bruce & Sedo, Stanley, 1996. "Discrimination, social psychology, and hysteresis in labor markets," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 465-478, August.
    2. Petrocelli, Matthew & Piquero, Alex R. & Smith, Michael R., 2003. "Conflict theory and racial profiling: An empirical analysis of police traffic stop data," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 1-11.
    3. Bourguignon, Francois, 1979. "Decomposable Income Inequality Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(4), pages 901-920, July.
    4. Phelps, Edmund S, 1972. "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 659-661, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Borooah, Vani, 2021. "Racial Bias in Policing: Police Stop and Searches in England and Wales," MPRA Paper 113064, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Parker, Karen F. & Stansfield, Richard & McCall, Patricia L., 2016. "Temporal changes in racial violence, 1980 to 2006: A latent trajectory approach," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 1-11.
    3. Zhuoying Fan & Xuewei Zhang & Guangwen Song & Chunxia Zhang, 2025. "Factors influencing the spatial distribution of police stops and their efficacy in crime prevention and control," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 12(1), pages 1-9, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ruzzier, Christian A. & Woo, Marcelo D., 2023. "Discrimination with inaccurate beliefs and confirmation bias," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 210(C), pages 379-390.
    2. Rassou R., 1993. "Statistical measurement of gender wage differentials," ILO Working Papers 992920693402676, International Labour Organization.
    3. Das,Maitreyi B, 2015. "All in my head ? the play of exclusion and discrimination in the labor market," Policy Research Working Paper Series 7468, The World Bank.
    4. repec:ilo:ilowps:292069 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Borooah, Vani & Myers, Samuel, 2014. "Discriminatory Behaviour: Issues Related to Theory and Measurement," MPRA Paper 75712, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Borooah, Vani, 2002. "Employment Inequality, Employment Regulation, and Social Welfare," MPRA Paper 20008, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Maitreyi Bordia Das, 2013. "Exclusion and Discrimination in the Labor Market," World Bank Publications - Reports 20139, The World Bank Group.
    8. Chowdhury, Shyamal & Ooi, Evarn & Slonim, Robert, 2017. "Racial discrimination and white first name adoption: a field experiment in the Australian labour market," Working Papers 2017-15, University of Sydney, School of Economics.
    9. Anja‐Kristin Abendroth & Yvonne Lott & Lena Hipp & Dana Müller & Armin Sauermann & Tanja Carstensen, 2022. "Has the COVID‐19 pandemic changed gender‐ and parental‐status‐specific differences in working from home? Panel evidence from Germany," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(6), pages 1991-2011, November.
    10. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    11. Wouter Dessein & Alex Frankel & Navin Kartik, 2025. "Test-Optional Admissions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 115(9), pages 3130-3170, September.
    12. Barthel, Jens, 2008. "Can age discrimination be justified with a lower productivity of older workers?," MPRA Paper 14682, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Anthony Edo & Nicolas Jacquemet & Constantine Yannelis, 2019. "Language skills and homophilous hiring discrimination: Evidence from gender and racially differentiated applications," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 349-376, March.
    14. repec:mse:cesdoc:09059r is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Kevin Lang & Ariella Kahn-Lang Spitzer, 2020. "Race Discrimination: An Economic Perspective," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 34(2), pages 68-89, Spring.
    16. Ye Zhang, 2020. "Discrimination in the Venture Capital Industry: Evidence from Field Experiments," Papers 2010.16084, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2022.
    17. Klumpp, Tilman & Su, Xuejuan, 2013. "Second-order statistical discrimination," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 108-116.
    18. Juan Luis Londoño & Miguel Székely, 2000. "Persistent Poverty and Excess Inequality: Latin America, 1970-1995," Journal of Applied Economics, Universidad del CEMA, vol. 3, pages 93-134, May.
    19. Sami Napari, 2008. "The Early‐career Gender Wage Gap among University Graduates in the Finnish Private Sector," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 22(4), pages 697-733, December.
    20. Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Urrutia & Oscar Volij, 2011. "An Axiomatic Characterization Of The Theil Inequality Order," Working Papers 1103, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    21. Bryson, Alex & Chevalier, Arnaud, 2015. "Is there a taste for racial discrimination amongst employers?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 51-63.
    22. Kaiser, Lutz C., 2014. "The Gender-Career Estimation Gap," IZA Discussion Papers 8185, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • K14 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Criminal Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:34471. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.