But Is It Racial Profiling?: Policing, Pretext Stops, and the Color of Suspicion (Criminal Justice) (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship)

Gumbhir offers conceptual, theoretical, and empirical innovations to help unravel and illuminate the forces that produce racial disparities in law enforcement. Gumbhir provides a theoretical framework for analyzing racial differences in police contacts, as well as a conceptualization of racial profiling that emphasizes police procedures related to the War on Drugs specifically pretext stop practices. Drawing on a grounded statistical analysis of vehicle stop data from a Pacific Northwest community, Gumbhir exposes racial disparities in terms of stops, searches, enforcement actions (citations and arrests), and other variables of interest. By studying patterns in the results, Gumbhir concludes that the police disproportionately apply pretext stop tactics to minority drivers.