Speed Discounting and Racial Disparities: Evidence from Speeding Tickets in Boston

Nejat Anbarci () and Jungmin Lee

No 3903, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Law enforcement officers are allowed to exercise a significant amount of street-level discretion in a variety of ways. In this paper, we focus on a particular prominent kind of discretionary behavior by traffic officers when issuing speeding tickets, speed discounting. Officers partially forgive motorists by writing a lower speed level than the speed that officers observe. Verifying the level of speed discounting by different groups of officers and motorists and ascertaining the presence of racial disparities in this lenient policing are the main objectives of this paper. We find that minority officers, particularly African-Americans, are harsher on all motorists but even harsher on minority motorists regarding speed discounting. The minority-on-minority disparity appears to be stronger in situations involving Hispanic officers, infrequently ticketing officers, male motorists, those driving old vehicles, and minority neighborhoods.

Keywords: police discretion; disparate treatment; racial bias; speeding tickets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J70 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3903.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3903

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().