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Racial Disparity in Police Stop and Searches in England and Wales

Author

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  • 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

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    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/34471/1/MPRA_paper_34471.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bourguignon, Francois, 1979. "Decomposable Income Inequality Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(4), pages 901-920, July.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    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.
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    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.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Racial disparity; racial discrimination; stops; arrests; cautions; sentences; inequality measures;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

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

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