A Critique of the “Outcome Test” in Racial Profiling Research

Abstract

In racial profiling research, four different research perspectives-legalistic, criminological, economic, and normative-have emerged. The analytical techniques of two of these perspectives, the legalistic and criminological, have been thoroughly detailed in prior research. More recently, the economic perspective has presented an alternative analytical strategy (i.e., the outcome test), to determine racial and ethnic discrimination by police. When applied to police searches, the outcome test is a statistical comparison of search success rates across racial and ethnic groups. The outcome test, however, is based on a number of underlying assumptions regarding police and citizen behaviors that do not coincide with what is known about decision-making during police-citizen encounters. These underlying assumptions are described and the conclusions based on the use of the outcome test are critiqued. The implications for the use of the outcome test and other analytical techniques for the future of racial profiling research are discussed.

Driving racial profiling research forward: Learning lessons from sentencing research

“…Specifically, post-stop outcome analyses offered the opportunity to use multivariate models to specify the impact of the driver's race/ ethnicity, net of other factors, thereby overcoming the limitation of benchmarking. Additional analytical techniques have been developed for analyzing post-stop outcomes including propensity score matching (Ridgeway, 2006;Ridgway & MacDonald, 2009) and the outcome test (Knowles, Persico, & Todd, 2001; for a thorough discussion of the outcome test see Engel, 2008;Persico & Todd, 2008). Collectively, recent studies of post-stop outcomes are scientifically more rigorous than earlier studies that examined traffic stopping trends due to improved data collection and analysis techniques.…”

Discrimination Data Analysis: A Multi-disciplinary Bibliography

“…In this respect, starting from the influential paper proposed in (Knowles et al, 2001), several extensions and critiques have been presented (Antonovics & Knight, 2009;Anwar & Fang, 2006;Gardner, 2009;Rowe, 2008;Sanga, 2009). We refer to the surveys (Tillyer et al, 2010;Engel, 2008) for extensive references. Recent additional approaches include (Anbarci & Lee, 2008;Blalock et al, 2007;Pickerill et al, 2009;Ridgeway, 2006).…”

The Hit Rates Test for Racial Bias in Motor‐Vehicle Searches

“…This paper exposits a rational choice model of police-motorist interactions and addresses a number of concerns raised in a recent article by Engel (2008). The policing model was originally developed in Knowles, Persico, and Todd (2001) and generalized in Todd (2005, 2006).…”