IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nathum/v5y2021i5d10.1038_s41562-020-01029-w.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Officer bias, over-patrolling and ethnic disparities in stop and search

Author

Listed:
  • Lara Vomfell

    (University of Warwick)

  • Neil Stewart

    (University of Warwick)

Abstract

Black and Asian people in the United Kingdom are more likely to be stopped and searched by police than White people. Following a panel of 36,000 searches by 1,100 police officers at a major English police force, we provide officer-specific measures of over-searching relative to two baselines: the ethnic composition of crime suspects officers interact with and the ethnic composition of the areas they patrol. We show that the vast majority of officers over-search ethnic minorities against both baselines. But we also find that the over-searching by individual officers cannot account for all of the over-representation of ethnic minorities in stop and search: over-patrolling of minority areas is also a key factor. Decomposing the overall search bias, we find that the over-representation of Asian people in stop and search is primarily accounted for by over-patrolling, while the over-representation of Black people is a combination of officer and patrol effects, with the larger contribution coming from biases of officers.

Suggested Citation

  • Lara Vomfell & Neil Stewart, 2021. "Officer bias, over-patrolling and ethnic disparities in stop and search," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 5(5), pages 566-575, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:5:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-020-01029-w
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01029-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01029-w
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41562-020-01029-w?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eric Halford, 2024. "The Proportionality of Police Stop and Search in the Coronavirus Pandemic," SAGE Open, , vol. 14(3), pages 21582440241, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:5:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-020-01029-w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.