The New York Times

An examination of traffic stops and arrests in Greensboro, N.C., uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct.

By Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren

October 24, 2015

As most of America now knows, those pervasive doubts about the police mirror those of millions of other African-Americans. More than a year of turmoil over the deaths of unarmed blacks after encounters with the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Baltimore and elsewhere has sparked a national debate over how much racial bias skews law enforcement behavior, even subconsciously. 

Documenting racial profiling in police work is devilishly difficult, because a multitude of factors-including elevated violent crime rates in many black neighborhoods- makes it hard to tease out evidence of bias from other influences. But an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data in this racially mixed city of 280,000 uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct.

Those same disparities were found across North Carolina, the state that collects the most detailed data on traffic stops. And at least some of them showed up in the six other states that collect comprehensive traffic-stop statistics.

Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population.They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists-even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.