Characterizing patterns in police stops by race in Minneapolis from 2016-2021

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 170,000 police stops in Minneapolis from 2016-2021, revealing racial disparities in searches and how police activity changed after George Floyd's murder.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, data-driven analysis of racial patterns in police stops and searches, addressing neighborhood effects and temporal changes in Minneapolis.

Findings

Black individuals are searched at higher rates than White individuals.

Police stops declined after George Floyd's murder.

Disproportionate policing patterns are evident by race.

Abstract

The murder of George Floyd centered Minneapolis, Minnesota, in conversations on racial injustice in the US. We leverage open data from the Minneapolis Police Department to analyze individual, geographic, and temporal patterns in more than 170,000 police stops since 2016. We evaluate person and vehicle searches at the individual level by race using generalized estimating equations with neighborhood clustering, directly addressing neighborhood differences in police activity. Minneapolis exhibits clear patterns of disproportionate policing by race, wherein Black people are searched at higher rates compared to White people. Temporal visualizations indicate that police stops declined following the murder of George Floyd. This analysis provides contemporary evidence on the state of policing for a major metropolitan area in the United States.