Frank R. Baumgartner, "Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Summary

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the collection of demographic data on those detained by the police during routine traffic stops, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues analyzed twenty million such stops from 2002-2016. They present the results of this research in Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Join us as we speak with Baumgartner about what they found---and what we can do to reduce the most discriminatory features of the practice.

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Stephen Pimpare

Stephen Pimpare is Professor of Public Policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

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