
100M police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias - raiyu
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inside-100-million-police-traffic-stops-new-evidence-racial-bias-n980556
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techbio
Seriously? They didn't control for the year, make and model of the car?

[https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/](https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/)

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mlevental
why exactly does that matter? I see a lot people bring things up like this and
I always wonder if some feature is perfectly correlated with race, like e.g.
car make/model/year, or clothing, or music being listened to during time of
stop, what difference does it make? best case the cops are discriminating for
the covariates (not something we'd be comfortable with either) and worst case
they're using the covariates to discriminate for the confounder. suffice it to
say there's no outcome to "controlling" that we would be satisfied with.

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techbio
No, it would either strengthen their argument or weaken it. Hiding/ignoring
the obviously relevant data, it _looks like_ it would've weakened the point
they are making, ie. that its persuasive effect has been engineered. If the
effect is as profound and as they say (police pull over brown-skinned people
because of their skin color and not something else), be convincing if you are
convinced of it. Show the data, not just the subset that most cleanly states
what you set out to state before analysis.

Maybe it shows that black people usually drive Mazdas or whatever and that
those are targeted by law enforcement. Maybe it doesn't. We don't know.

They've controlled for daylight. Not traffic offense. Not Mazdas. Why not?

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masonic
Of all of the data sets they use, exactly _zero_ takes the _race of the
officer_ or officers into account.

If they are trying to claim that statistical differences are primarily
explained by racial bias, to completely ignore the commonality or difference
in race between the driver and the officers conducting the stop seems like a
major flaw to me.

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zunzun
I have read that there are differences in average height between races. Was
the height difference statistically controlled for in this study? The article
does not mention this.

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consumer451
According to this article[0] the height difference is not significant:

> Across the United States, the average black man and the average white man
> are roughly the same height and weight. According to what data are
> available, such as information taken from Centers for Disease Control and
> Prevention surveys, the average white man older than 20 weighs 199 pounds.
> So does the average black man. Height averages for black and white men are
> within a centimeter of each other, with the average white man being slightly
> taller at 5-foot-10.

[0] [https://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/nationworld/ct-
male-...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/nationworld/ct-male-body-
study-20170314-story.html)

