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SDPD Traffic:

Police Action & Race

San Diego is the eight-largest city in the United States, with its current population of 1.3 million expected to grow to 1.54 million by 2020 and 1.95 million by 2050.  Its population is 44.2% White (non-Hispanic), 28.8% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, 16.4% Asian, 3.2% Multi-racial, and 0.8% Other.  With the neighborhood partnerships of the San Diego Police Department, San Diego has become one of the safest metropolitan cities in the country.  Given the current racial climate of the United States, however, a statistical review of police action and race can identify the need for any additional outreach or training to provide for non-racially-biased policing and reduce the potential for inequalities resulting in racial tension.  The objective of this study was to statistically evaluate the association of police action and race, controlling for gender, age group, San Diego residency, and time-of-day.  San Diego Police Department vehicle-stop data from 2014 through 2017 was utilized to provide the review of nearly 400,000 interactions.  SAS was utilized to perform univariate and logistic regression analyses, as well as provide for multivariable and multivariate analysis of interactions and investigations of confounding and multicollinearity.  The model has fairly-good predictive capabilities as measured by the c-statistic, and the results indicated a statistically-significant association between race and police action, as well as between those variables and gender, age, San Diego residency status, and time-of-day.  While many additional factors need to be reviewed to identify causal factors and create opportunities for correction, these results support the need for such effort to occur.

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