Do Driver Decisions in Traffic Court Motivate Police Discrimination in Issuing Speeding Tickets?

Sarah Marx Quintanar ()
Additional contact information
Sarah Marx Quintanar: http://www.bus.lsu.edu/academics/Economics/PhDWebPage.asp?autoid=331

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Louisiana State University

Abstract: This research provides new insights into police discrimination by following individuals’ decisions in the court process from the time a speeding ticket is issued to trial. Quintanar (2011) finds that African-Americans and women are more likely to receive a speeding ticket from a police officer as opposed to an automated source, but is unable to determine whether this is evidence of statistical or preference-based discrimination. This paper expands upon those results by using a unique dataset which contains detailed information about the court procedural choices of individuals ticketed by police. African-Americans are more likely to fight their speeding ticket, while there is no significant behavioral difference by gender. This contradicts a motive of statistical discrimination by police; targeting individuals who are likely to pay immediately rather than use court resources to fight the ticket. Potential discrimination in prosecutor and judge behavior is also investigated.

References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://bus.lsu.edu/McMillin/Working_Papers/pap11_13.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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lsu:lsuwpp:2011-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Louisiana State University
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().