True or False: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police officers pull over and ticket African-American drivers at a higher rate than white drivers. The answer? False.
A recent study concluded that race plays virtually no role in who receives a ticket from Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers and how the judicial system treats them afterward. The study would have been big news if it had been released, but it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s because the study, which was done by researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was funded with a statewide grant from the “Race Will Not Divide Us” initiative, and was supposed to be part one of a two-part strategy to find evidence of racial discrimination and combat it.
But in July, a bombshell was dropped on the Community Building Initiative and the 26th Judicial District Partnership, the Mecklenburg County group behind the study. Their valiant battle against this form of racism was not to be, because there was no statistically provable racism to combat.
The study would have likely faded into oblivion if a copy of it floating around the judicial system and county political circles hadn’t eventually made its way to the offices of Creative Loafing. So here it goes.
The study analyzed 341 randomly selected tickets for red-light running, speeding, out-of-date inspection stickers and seatbelt violations out of the 35,403 issued in 1999 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and the North Carolina Highway Patrol. Of those, 67 percent were issued to white drivers and 26 percent to African-Americans. According to the 2000 Census, whites make up 64 percent of the county population; blacks, 27.9 percent.
In fact, the only statistically significant discrimination the study found was by sex. Men got 66.3 percent of the tickets issued. Women got 33.7 percent. Or, to be more specific, white males got 45.5 percent of the tickets issued, white females got 21.7 percent, black males got 15.8 percent and black females, 10.6 percent.
Overall, African-Americans fared better than whites once they entered the court system. Twenty-nine percent of African-Americans had their cases dismissed, compared to only 17 percent of whites.
Whites paid average fines of $17.48, compared to $16.95 for African-Americans and on average, whites paid $98.85 in court costs while African-Americans paid $96.86.
The only racially significant oddity the study found was that more white drivers (24.4 percent) than black drivers (10.2 percent) got tickets for seat belt violations while more African-American drivers (30.6 percent) were ticketed for inspection violations than whites (20 percent).
And that’s it. No racist thug cops, no repressive white power structure. Just a bunch of folks doing their jobs well — and fairly.
The only data that didn’t add up was from the focus groups the committee also conducted. In these, many people seemed determined to cling to the belief that the system worked against minorities, no matter what the numbers said.
It’s these people and those who think like them, not our officers, who are the problem. They’re the ones who need to change their perceptions, to believe that mindsets are changing in a changing world, and that they are changing for the better. Progress is possible. These are the same sort of people who’d withhold this study, which came out in July, from the public while this city’s cops were hit with a racial profiling policy that requires them to turn in fairly extensive paperwork on every person they pull over, no matter what their race, and in the process to waste valuable time that could be spent doing what they were hired to do — protect us and fight crime.
If the members of the Community Building Initiative 26th Judicial District Resource Team really care about keeping race from dividing us, they’ll release this study to the media. It’s about time, isn’t it?
This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2001.
