Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches have Efficiency Costs?

Abstract

During traffic stops, police search black and Hispanic motorists more than twice as often as white motorists, yet those searches are no more likely to yield contraband. We ask whether equalizing search rates by motorist race would reduce contraband yield. We use unique administrative data from Texas to isolate variation in search behavior across and within highway patrol troopers and find that search rates are unrelated to the proportion of searches that yield contraband. We find that troopers can equalize search rates across racial groups, maintain the status quo search rate, and increase contraband yield. Troopers appear to be limited in their ability to discern between motorists that are more or less likely to carry contraband. JEL Codes: J15, K42. ∗We thank the editors, Larry Katz and Stefanie Stantcheva, five anonymous referees, Ian Ayres, Felipe Goncalves, Peter Hull, Patrick Kline, Jonathan Leonard, David Levine, Dan O’Flaherty, Steven Rivkin, Evan Rose, Yotam Shem-Tov, Chris Walters, and seminar participants at USC, University of Illinois, Chicago, the Online Economics of Crime seminar, the Online Economics of Racism seminar, NBER Summer Institute, Yale SOM, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT for helpful comments. We thank researchers at the Stanford Open Policing Project for providing data on Texas Highway Patrol stops. We thank the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at Haas for providing computing resources.