Suspicion in Numbers: Pretextual Traffic Stops of Young Black Men Traveling Together

This study explores whether police officers are especially likely to stop and investigate young Black males traveling in parties of two or more. Our analysis is guided by social psychological theory and research suggesting that racial stereotypes about criminality are applied with greater intensity to Black people encountered in groups. Investigatory stop data for Philadelphia indicate that relative to young White men, young Black men are about five times more likely to be pulled over in the company of other young men of the same race ( n = 41,633). Using the veil-of-darkness test, we show that this disparity cannot be easily explained by racial differences in motorist behavior (such as carpooling). Our analyses reveal that young Black men in groups experience a significantly elevated probability of being stopped for traffic violations when daylight visibility facilitates officer discernment of vehicle passengers from afar. Previous studies have left this dynamic unexplored, implicitly assuming that multi-occupant vehicle stops are equally distributed across racial categories and/or that having a lone young Black male driver would produce a ceiling effect in the level of disparate scrutiny and selective traffic enforcement. We find that while young Black males traveling alone are disadvantaged in inter-racial comparisons, intra-racially they are less likely to be targeted than young Black males in groups. Overall, our results suggest that beyond a present-versus-absent dichotomy, the presence of additional young Black men in a vehicle increases the likelihood of being selected for a pretextual traffic stop.