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Research Seminar – Michael Watts (University of Stirling)
March 27 @ 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
{In-Person Event Only}
Title:
Watching the Watchmen: Does Metropolitan Police stop & search data show evidence of bias?
Abstract:
Since 2016, the Metropolitan Police has recorded the time, location, and various characteristics of every stop and search conducted by its officers, including the ethnicity, gender, and age range of the individual searched. This allows a range of statistical tests to be used to assess whether disparities in search rates can be explained by differences in observed behaviour across sub-groups (i.e. statistical discrimination), or whether they reflect bias. I apply a Bayesian hierarchical model that treats both the signal distribution and the decision threshold as latent variables, allowing both hit rate and threshold tests to be conducted using the posterior distributions. The results show no evidence of racial bias in recent years, though teenagers appear to be subjected to stricter scrutiny than older Londoners.