November 15, 2010 – Finn Institute researchers appeared today at a meeting of the Syracuse Common Council’s Public Safety Committee to present the results of their analysis of stops by Syracuse police, an inquiry into whether the stops exhibit a pattern of racial profiling. A 2001 Syracuse ordinance mandates the collection of data on stops, and the Common Council has twice commissioned analyses of the data, first in 2006 and again this year – studies that relied on an approach known as the “outcome test.” Skeptical about the utility of the outcome test in analyzing the Syracuse data, the Institute proposed to Syracuse’s Chief Frank Fowler to conduct an analysis using the “veil-of-darkness” method, an approach devised by researchers at the RAND Corporation. Institute Director Robert Worden pointed out that “the study commissioned by the Common Council suffers from several shortcomings, but it has two fatal flaws that render its results uninterpretable. The limitations of the outcome test and of the available data make the veil-of-darkness method the most appropriate approach.” Analyzing vehicle stops in the “inter-twilight” period – the times of day when it might be light or dark, depending on the time of year – the Institute tested to see whether African-Americans were more likely to be stopped during daylight, when drivers’ race can be more readily determined by officers, than in darkness. Finding no consistent differences between stops in daylight and stops in darkness, the Institute’s analysis detected no persuasive evidence of racial bias in stops. (See the report here.)
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