Description

On a typical day in the United States, police officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops. The Stanford Open Policing Project team is gathering, analyzing, and releasing records from millions of traffic stops by law enforcement agencies across the country. Their goal is to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public.

Content:

This dataset includes stop data from MS, MT, ND, NH, NJ, NV, OR, RI, SD, TN,  VA, V, WI, and WY. Please see the data readme for the full details of the available fields.

Each row in the standardized data for each state provides information for one state patrol stop. All standardized data files contain the following columns. If a column cannot be computed using the data a state has provided, it is set to NA. Some states also have additional columns (e.g., an ID for the officer making the stop), which we do not use in our analysis, but which we include here because they might be useful to other researchers. These extra columns are explained in the state notes.

For several fields (e.g., driverrace) we include a "raw" column which records the original data values from which we infer standardized values. For example, driverraceraw might be “White Hispanic” which we code as “Hispanic” in the standardized driverrace field. We include the raw columns because our data processing pipeline is extensive, requiring judgment calls and subjective decisions. We aim to make our data processing as transparent as possible. Other analysts may choose to process the raw data differently if their needs or judgments differ.