In light of new state-level laws regarding immigration enforcement, profiling and the racial elements it incorporates continue to be a controversial issue in American life. Charles Epp and his coauthors are interested in the most criticized of these encounters, discretionary police stops where police use drivers minor violations of the law to investigate the driver on suspicion of criminal activity. Deftly combining historical, theoretical, and empirical approaches, Pulled Over traces the strange history of the ...
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In light of new state-level laws regarding immigration enforcement, profiling and the racial elements it incorporates continue to be a controversial issue in American life. Charles Epp and his coauthors are interested in the most criticized of these encounters, discretionary police stops where police use drivers minor violations of the law to investigate the driver on suspicion of criminal activity. Deftly combining historical, theoretical, and empirical approaches, Pulled Over traces the strange history of the investigatory stop, from its discredited beginning as aggressive patrolling to its current status as an endorsed institutional practice. Based on the largest study to date, the authors show how investigatory stops generate racial disparities in who is stopped and how they are treated. For African-Americans, the experience of investigatory stops erodes their perceptions of the legitimacy of police stops and of the police generally. It leads them to be less trusting of the police, to be less willing to call the police for help, and to self-censor their clothes and where they drive. This holds even though police are almost always courteous and respectful in the encounters and are following seemingly color-blind institutional protocols. Ultimately, the authors argue that, even if unintended, investigatory stops exhibit a racial disparity and have a profound and deleterious impact on African Americans."
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