The empirical evidence that race influences outcomes in the criminal justice system is overwhelming. Study after study finds evidence that people’s race changes the way they are treated by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries. Most researchers in this area are not only no longer shocked by clear evidence that people are treated differently because of their race—they are instead bored because there is already so much evidence on the subject.

The huge amount of scholarship on race and criminal justice also makes it difficult to find new novel ways to research it. But I just came across a new approach: leveraging the fact that police officers are dispatched to automobile crashes independently of the drivers race to explore the role of race on traffic citations. Here’s the abstract of the paper Jeremy Smith—an economics professor at UC Santa Cruz—wrote using this research design:

Nonrandom selection into police encounters typically complicates evaluations of law enforcement discrimination. This study overcomes selection concerns by examining automobile crash investigations, for which officer dispatch is demonstrably independent of drivers’ race. I find State Police officers issue significantly more traffic citations to drivers whose race differs from their own. This bias is evident for both moving and nonmoving violations, the latter indicating a preference for discriminatory leniency towards same-race individuals. I show this treatment is unmitigated by socioeconomic factors: officers cite other-race drivers more frequently regardless of their age, gender, vehicle value, or characteristics of the local community.

H/T to my colleague Austin Wright’s twitter feed for tipping me off to this paper.