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Replication Data for: Do Female Officers Police Differently? Evidence from Traffic Stops

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Do Female Officers Police Differently? Evidence from Traffic Stops
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QTUF6D
 
Creator Shoub, Kelsey
Stauffer, Katelyn E.
Song, Miyeon
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Political scientists have increasingly begun to study how citizen characteristics shape whether—and how—they interact with the police. Less is known about how officer characteristics shape these interactions. In this article, we examine how one officer characteristic—officer sex—shapes the nature of police-initiated contact with citizens. Drawing on literature from multiple fields, we develop and test a set of competing expectations. Using over four million traffic stops made by the Florida State Highway Patrol and Charlotte (North Carolina) Police Department, we find that women officers are less likely to search drivers than men on the force. Despite these lower search rates, when women officers do conduct a search, they are more likely to find contraband and they confiscate the same net amount of contraband as men. These results indicate that women officers are able to minimize the number of negative interactions with citizens without losses in effectiveness.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Police
Traffic stops
Officer sex
Representative bureaucracy
 
Contributor Shoub, Kelsey
 
Source E. Pierson, C. Simoiu, J. Overgoor, S. Corbett-Davies, D. Jenson, A. Shoemaker, V. Ramachandran, P. Barghouty, C. Phillips, R. Shroff, and S. Goel. “A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States”. Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 4, 2020.



Baumgartner FR, Bell K, Beyer L, Boldrin T, Doyle L, Govan L, Halpert J, Hicks J, Kyriakoudes K, Lee C, Leger M. Intersectional Encounters, Representative Bureaucracy, and the Routine Traffic Stop. Policy Studies Journal. 2020.



City of Charlotte [North Carolina]. Officer Traffic Stops. Charlotte [North Carolina] Open Data Portal. https://data.charlottenc.gov/datasets/officer-traffic-stops.