Opening the Black Box of Officer Decision-Making: An Examination of Race, Criminal History, and Discretionary Searches

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that police officers engage in discretionary searches of minority citizens at a disproportionate rate; however, the impact of citizen criminal history on this relationship is largely unknown. Using the theoretical framework of officer suspicion, this study examines the impact of citizen race on the likelihood of a discretionary search and whether this relationship is mediated by citizen criminal history. A series of multilevel models were computed on officer-initiated traffic stops in a manner that conforms to Baron and Kenny's recommendations to test for mediation effects. Results indicated that while citizen race was predictive of a discretionary search, this effect was mediated by consideration of criminal history. These findings have implications for understanding the decision-making process of officers, the influence of citizen race on these decisions, and the role of officer suspicion in police-citizen encounters.

Another Piece of the Puzzle: The Importance of Officer Characteristics and Group Processes in Understanding Post-stop Outcomes

“…Empirical evidence on officer-initiated police–citizen encounters indicates a pattern of disproportionate treatment of minority citizens in an officer’s decision to search a citizen or a vehicle (Engel and Johnson 2006; Rosenfeld, Rojek, and Decker 2012), initiate an arrest (Kochel, Wilson, and Mastrofski 2011), and/or issue a citation/ticket (Engel and Calnon 2004). 1 Other citizen characteristics (Tillyer 2014), situational aspects of the encounter (Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker 2012), and the broader environmental context (Novak and Chamlin 2012) also exert an influence on these poststop outcomes.…”

(Cr)immigrant framing in border areas: decision-making processes of Dutch border police officers

“…Meanwhile a wealth of studies has addressed decision-making processes of regular police officers, and the issue of ethno-racial profiling in stop-and-search contexts in particular (Holmberg 2000, Waddington et al 2004, Wilson et al 2004, Alpert et al 2005, Dunham 2005, Schafer et al 2006, Stroshine et al 2008, Parmar 2011, Quinton 2011, Fallik and Novak 2012, Tillyer 2012, Mutsaers 2014. Whereas this body of research has provided valuable insights in the way regular police officers exercise their discretion in crime control, border policing officers have a fundamentally different task -as their main focus is migration control -and they are often equipped with powers in both crime control and migration control (Sklansky 2012).…”

The Impact of Police Deployment on Racial Disparities in Discretionary Searches

“…Given the proactive nature of traffic stops and limited guidance from department policies or court decisions regarding the selection of drivers for searches (Walker, 2005), police officers often have a great deal of discretion in this decision (Reiss, 1971). Research focusing on how this authority is exercised usually finds stops of Black drivers are more likely to include discretionary searches (Briggs & Crew, 2013;Tillyer, 2014). The deployment hypothesis proposes that these disparities are the result of greater police presence and proactivity in conducting searches within higher crime areas when those areas are disproportionately traversed by racial and ethnic minority drivers.…”

“…This review and the analyses that follow focus specifically on discretionary searches which are officer-initiated investigations based on officer judgment (Walker, 2005). In contrast, nondiscretionary searches are typically mandatory for officers and are required by department policies (Kochel, 2011;Tillyer, 2014). While some researchers have used reasons given for initiating contacts or the dispositions of traffic stops to identify discretionary searches (Engel & Calnon, 2004;Lundman, 2004;Smith & Petrocelli, 2001), the most common technique uses the reasons provided by officers for conducting searches.…”