Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. By Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Elaider Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 272 pp. 25.00 paperback.

It is rare to read a new book that makes important contributions to multiple fields and literatures. It is rarer still when the book addresses the interrelation of race, perceived criminality, and policing-historically fraught affiliations that remain so despite being extensively explored within law and social science research. In Pulled Over: Hem Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, the authors make these important contributions. In the narrowest sense, the book analyzes a survey of over 2300 motorists about their experiences with traffic stops in the Kansas City Metropolitan area. The findings, however, do much more. They differentiate between stops where race does or does not provide the basis for the encounter and in so doing, utilize methods that are attendant to both critical and sociolegal approaches. As a result, the text offers crucial insights into how "race shapes and is shaped by police stops in often hidden and subtle but profound and foundational ways" (p. xvi).

The book importantly illustrates that police stops work differently depending on the justification for the stop. There are traffic safety stops, which officers identify as premised on "must-stop" violations (p. 60), and there are investigatory stops, which are used to address low-level violations. In assessing the likelihood of a driver being stopped, the researchers assessed stops for excessive speeding (one type of traffic safety stop), traffic safety stops more generally, and investigatory stops. Across these stops, they evaluated a number of characteristics of the drivers and vehicles driven. These characteristics included whether drivers were African American, gender, age, vehicle value, vehicle type (luxury cars), and vehicle damage. The research revealed that African Americans are much less likely to be given traffic safety justifications for being stopped and much more likely to be provided no reason or low-level violation justifications. To a significant degree-2.7 times more likely than Whites-Blacks are disproportionately stopped for investigatory stops.

Investigatory stops implicate racial profiling and are consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court's Whren...