As Heather Mac Donald writes in her bo
ok The War On Cops: How the New Attack On Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, the Department of Justice tries to assert that racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department was inherent in the fact that blacks consisted of 85 percent of all traffic stops between 2012-2014, despite only being 67 percent of the city's residents, while whites consisted of 15 percent of all traffic stops while being 29 percent of the city's residents.
"Such figures are meaningless unless we know, just for starters, what the rate of traffic violations is among black and white drivers," writes Mac Donald. "Though most criminologists are terrified of studying the matter, the research that has been done, in New Jersey and North Carolina, found that black drivers speed disproportionately. On the New Jersey turnpike, for example, black drivers studied in 2001 sped at twice the rate of white drivers (with speeding defined as traveling at 15 mph or more above the posted limit) and traveled at the most reckless levels of speed even more disproportionately."
This is
confirmed by a 2013 National Institute for Justice report that determined that three out of four blacks said they were pulled over for a "legitimate reason" and a National Highway Safety Administration report concluding that "blacks simply violated traffic laws at higher rates than whites."
Additionally, the DoJ report found that blacks were more likely to be searched after a traffic stop than whites, as 11 percent of blacks stopped were searched as opposed to five percent of whites, but as MacDonald points out, blacks tend to have a "higher rate of outstanding warrants," which explains the discrepancy.