A number of years ago, during the Obama administration, there was a hue and cry that black students were given greater school punishment than white (or Asian or Hispanic) students.
It might of course be true. The real question of interest is whether black (or any race of student) students were being given more punishments proportionate to their level of misconduct. I think everyone can agree that all students should be punished similarly for similar misconduct.
But disproportionality is as far as the Obama administration got. If more punishments were being administered to black students than others, it must be discriminatory and stopped. And indeed the Department of Education did undertake some such program forcing schools to stop punishing students.
In the years following there was research about both causes and the effect of the new rules.
The proposition was reasonably suspect from the beginning. Because American schools are locally financed and because American living patterns are materially disaggregated by income, education, and class and therefore by race, American schools have a pretty high degree of effective segregation (segregation arising from citizen choices of where to live, not segregation arising from government edict.)
Consequently, most punishments administered to black students would be issued by black teachers in black school systems. If there was a disproportionality, it could be either because black teachers and school systems were more strict than white school systems or because they were dealing with greater misbehavior.
Subsequent research has indeed pretty strongly indicated that higher levels of punishments are indeed due to higher levels of misbehavior, not due to discrimination. It has become one more example of a good intention (ensure fair and equal treatment) leading to bad outcomes. Schools with serious misbehavior issues are no longer able to use punishments to try and maintain safety and discipline. This in turn handicaps their capacity to create an environment of learning.
But at the time, before the data came in, I was curious. We are accustomed to all sorts of group disparities in crime, income, education attainment, family formation outcomes, health morbidity, diets, etc., which all arise from differing cultural and social norms rather than from race per se. How might we know whether there was greater propensity to misbehavior in black schools (in that time before research was available?)
I didn't think crime rates would be particularly useful, in part because crime is so underreported as well as because one would expect less serious juvenile crime to be even more underreported. I eventually hit on driving safety records. If a culture exhibits looser adherence to behavioral attributes, wouldn't that show up in higher accident rates among different groups of drivers?
Probably a reasonable assumption but I was not able to prove it out. Even at the crude level of race, the data just wasn't easily found for differential patterns of laws of the road adherence.
So when this report and the headline popped up I thought perhaps the old question might be answered.
Well, sort of.
I want to know whether there is a difference in driving behaviors among different groups, in this case between races. Does this report answer that?
Ideally, when dealing with unbiased cameras, you would know who was driving (and their) race when the infraction was incurred. You would know whether traffic volumes were similar across the distribution of cameras. You would want to know whether cameras might be affected by specific local conditions might affect the rate of ticket issuance (a light at the bottom of a steep hill and with a short switch time might have more instances of red light running.) This report does not really have those controls.
Ensure that the number of red light and speeding cameras are randomly distributed based on traffic volumes. If one assumes that traffic violations are roughly proportionate to traffic volumes, then the camera location ought to be driven by traffic volume considerations. It is unclear whether that is the case. The report does not address that question. They do affirm that cameras are equally distributed geographically across neighborhoods (and associated race connotations) but that is only partially assuring. If one neighborhood has high volume traffic and another low, and both have a single camera, then you would expect the high volume neighborhood to have more citations issued, regardless of the race of the neighborhood.
Can we know the race of the offenders? We ought to be able to. Presumably all tickets issued are to a licensed driver and presumably those tickets (once you have name and address) can then link to other data sources such as census information or the like which would contain race categorization. The report does not do that. It assumes that tickets in an area are reflective of the racial make-up of that area. Not a bad assumption, but not especially precise and therefore less accurate than would be desirable.
They make the best they can within the limitations with which they are working.
What they find is that the red light and speeding cameras do have a positive effect on reducing serious injuries and fatalities by 15%.
In terms of disparate impact:
We find that majority Black census tracts have the highest rates of tickets per household, followed by majority Latino census tracts as compared to majority White or other tracts. The number of cameras in close proximity to majority Black or majority Latino neighborhoods is not significantly greater than other neighborhoods.
Why the variance? Is it because there are differences in reckless driving behaviors across the groups or is it that the traffic conditions are systematically different in the neighborhoods based on race? There is muddled discussion about differences in built environment but it seems unpersuasive and, well . . . muddled.
It is clear that the report is primarily concerned about whether black drivers receive a disproportionate (to their share of the population) number of red light and speeding tickets (yes) and do they bare a heavier financial burden (yes).
But whether someone bares a disproportionate financial burden is quite a different issue. There are jurisdictions in Europe where there are plenty of interesting alternate approaches. I believe some of the Scandinavian countries have traffic fines in proportion of income. Everyone is subject to the same law. Everyone is punished to the same degree but the cost of the fine varies by ability to pay. Plenty to agree with or disagree with that approach but it is one of many alternatives.
In terms of whether there is a pattern of greater or lesser propensity to commit traffic violations based on racial groups, the report supports that there is but the underlying methodology reduces just how confident we can be in the magnitude of that disproportionality.
The report is disturbingly imprecise in its reporting. "We find that majority Black census tracts have the highest rates of tickets per household" is marginally informative but in order to know this, they would have to know the rates per household. Are they 10% higher? 50%? 100? more? We don't know. As a general rule of thumb, the more an outcome unsettles the researcher's priors, the higher the numbers likely were. The fact that the report does not include the data is also significant.
In the original Propublica reporting, there are a few hints supporting the supposition. Since they are covering the same issue as the UIC report, it is likely that the data is extendable. Emphasis added.
In 2020, ProPublica found, the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes jumped to more than three times that of households in majority-white areas. For households in majority-Hispanic ZIP codes, there was an increase, but it was much smaller.
Similar racial and income disparities in camera ticketing have been documented elsewhere. In Rochester, New York, officials eliminated the city’s red-light camera program in 2016 in part because motorists from low-income neighborhoods received the most tickets and the financial harm outweighed any safety benefits. Miami ended its program in 2017 amid complaints from low-income residents who felt unfairly burdened by the fines. And in Washington, D.C., racial justice advocates are researching the city’s camera-ticketing program after a local think tank in 2018 and The Washington Post last year found that cameras in Black neighborhoods issued a disproportionate share of tickets there.
This suggests that black drivers commit three times the traffic infractions as Hispanic or white drivers.
I will take that as a very provisional answer.
Whether red light and speeding cameras beneficially reduce traffic accidents, injurious accidents, and fatal accidents is a separate question. Both the Propublica and the UIC reports seem to aver that they do and to a material extent.
And that is separate from the judicial public policy issue of whether and how citizens should be held equally accountable under the law. In the US, that has meant similar crime under similar circumstances, similar fine or penalty. There is an argument to be made for the Scandinavian approach where the fine or penalty varies by capacity to pay (though some strong arguments against it though as well).
This ignores, though, the detrimental effect intended for penalties from certain crimes. If tickets for speeding decrease the number of instances speeding (and correspondingly injuries and deaths from speeding) then the fact that there are more speeders in a given neighborhood, regardless of race, means it is a more dangerous environment and the issuance of tickets (and fines) is desirous.
The UIC report focuses solely on the financial distress caused by dangerous drivers. They do not focus on the improvement in safety to those neighborhoods with a high rate of dangerous driving. This inattention to the benefits to law abiding citizens and focus on relieving burdens to transgressors is a curious blindspot of American progressives. It was seen in 2021 when the progressive effort to reduce policing and charging of perpetrators under the guise of racial equity then led to an increase in the loss of hundreds of additional black lives.
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