Measuring Racial Disparities in Police Stops: Evidence from Telemetric Mobility Data

The authors wish to acknowledge Aaron Chalfin, Greg Ridgeway, Felipe Goncalves, Steve Mello, Emily Owens, Ben Feigenberg, Sam Norris, Kevin Lang and Kenneth Barone for valuable comments on the paper, as well as participants at the 2025 NBER Crime Spring meeting and the Labor and Public Economics Workshop at Cornell University. Access to the Telemetric data, as well as some of the research time of the authors has been supported directly or through grants by the Institute for Metropolitan and Regional Policy (IMRP) at the University of Connecticut. Any errors or omissions are those of the authors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Institute for Metropolitan and Regional Policy (IMRP) at the University of Connecticut is an independent research institute partially funded by the State of Connecticut. It is responsible for staffing the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project (CTRP3) which is largely funded by U.S. Department of Transportation 1906 funds via a grant to IMRP and so as an institution has interest in work on Racial Profiling in police stops. Professor Matthew Ross has served as a statistical consultant for IMRP on the CTRP3 for many years. The IMRP has often acted as a passthrough entity for M. Ross' university on U.S. Department of Transportation grants. In excess of five years ago, M. Ross also received compensation as an independent contractor from IMRP. M. Ross expertise in racial profiling in police stops, stemming from his early work with IMRP on CTRP3, has led to numerous engagements with other local, state, and federal agencies. In recent years, IMRP has also financed a portion of Professor Stephen Ross’s academic year time (course buy-out) for work on several IMRP projects, including those related to racial profiling and CTRP3. Last academic year, Dr. Parker was a post-doc at Northeastern University, with a small portion of her salary paid by a subaward from IMRP on a federal grant where M. Ross is the principal investigator. IMRP had no influence on the views or findings of this evaluation.