More than 20 million drivers are stopped by police every year in the U.S. Although traffic stops are relatively routine, they can also turn deadly, particularly for minority drivers. It’s why some states have started to more closely examine racial disparities in traffic stops in an attempt to mitigate them. For more than a decade, one state, Connecticut, has served as the gold standard for this kind of policing policy change. A recent study from Northeastern University shows how successful the state has been in reducing racial disparities in traffic stops –– and why other states have failed to follow the Constitution State’s model.
In 2011, Connecticut launched the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, one of the first statewide programs aimed at addressing racial disparities in traffic stops at a systemic level. Since then, the program has served as a model at the state and federal level, becoming widely known as the “Connecticut model.” Matthew Ross, an associate professor of public policy and economics at Northeastern, has been working with Connecticut to conduct the annual racial profiling reports that are part of this program. Those analyses identify departments that have potential racial and ethnic disparities in traffic stop patterns and result in follow-up interventions with those departments that are designed to reduce disparities.
