Suspect Citizens

Frank R. Baumgartner holds the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professorship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of public policy and has written extensively on agenda-setting, policy-making, and lobbying. His work on criminal justice includes two previous books on the death penalty. Derek A. Epp is Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. In The Structure of Policy Change (forthcoming), he explains how the capacity of governmental institutions to process information affects public policy. He also studies economic inequality with a particular focus on understanding how rising inequality affects government agendas. Kelsey Shoub is a graduate student in the Department of Government at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on using publicly available big data to answer questions about what influences policy change, policy outputs, and the context within which they take place.

• 1. Suspect citizens: fighting the war on crime with traffic stops; 2. A legislative mandate to address concerns about racial profiling; 3. Who gets stopped?; 4. What happens after a stop?; 5. Finding contraband; 6. Search and arrest patterns by officer and agency; 7. Profiling Hispanics, profiling blacks; 8. Black political power and disparities in policing; 9. Reforms that reduce alienation and enhance community safety; 10. Conclusions.

'By focusing on every traffic stop in the state of North Carolina from 2002 to 2016, Suspect Citizens provides unassailable evidence of racial bias in routine police-citizen interactions. This book represents a monumental scholarly accomplishment that may also lead to important public policy reforms.' Vincent L. Hutchings, Hanes Walton, Jr, Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan