Driving While Broke: The Role of Class Signals in Police Discretion

There is ongoing debate over the latitude of discretion police officers have when conducting stops and searches. While necessary due to resource limitations and need for individualized justice, discretion involves subjective characteristics of suspicion formation, such as race and ethnicity, which could perpetuate disparities in traffic enforcement. Research has yet to explore other marginalizing characteristics of suspicion formation, such as drivers’ social class. This study draws on over 550,000 stops conducted by a large state police agency in 2022 and 2023 to explore how vehicle values serve as class signals influencing officers’ discretion. We found disparities, whereby lower value vehicles were more likely to be searched than higher value vehicles after matching based on when, where, and under what circumstances stops occurred. However, searches of lower value vehicles were less likely to result in contraband recovery. Our findings highlight potential avenues for officer training and research analyzing inequalities in policing.