Ethnic disparity in police enforcement

 Sentencing Project

• Police officers’ reliance on millions of minor traffic stops annually as a pretext to investigate drivers for criminal activity disproportionately impacts Black and Latinx drivers. Among those they pull over, police are more likely to search Black (6.2%) and Latinx drivers (9.2%) than whites (3.6%). But police are often less likely to find drugs or weapons among the Black and Latinx drivers that they search, compared to whites.
• Black and white Americans use illicit drugs at roughly similar rates, but about one in four people arrested for drug law violations are Black, although Black people make up 14% of the U.S. population.