We were able to determine the racial distribution of drivers receiving tickets easily, but we recognized that simply comparing the race of people getting tickets to the race of people living in Oakwood is not adequate since, as prior Oakwood officials argued, the demographics of people using the roads that run through Oakwood are likely to be different from the demographics of Oakwood itself (Dayton Daily News, ”Profiling Rumors Addressed,” Mara Lee, May 5, 2001).

It was not feasible to conduct an actual count of drivers nor was there a way to accurately model the racial make-up of drivers from available data, so we used two approaches to address this issue.

First, since most traffic tickets are given on the main arteries that run through Oakwood and since those arteries also run through Kettering, we conducted a similar analysis on Kettering traffic stops to allow comparison of the race of the drivers who were stopped in the two neighboring jurisdictions.

Second, we looked to see if the race of drivers receiving tickets in Oakwood varied depending on how the stop was initiated.

There are two primary ways a traffic stop is initiated in Oakwood. Oakwood police give traffic tickets when they see drivers committing traffic offenses or driving vehicles with obvious equipment problems. They also park adjacent to major streets and have the discretion to run computer database checks on the license plates of cars as they drive by to check for license suspensions and other infractions reflected in those data bases.

We compared the race of the drivers who received only status/suspension tickets (likely to have resulted from an officer running the license plate without observing a violation), to the race of the drivers who received moving violations and/or equipment violations, with or without status violations.