The political and social pressure for police departments to collect race-based traffic and pedestrian contact information has led to the accumulation of abundant sources of police-citizen contact data. Many of the current data collection efforts, however, do not include accurate benchmarks for data comparisons. The strengths and limitations of the six most prominent benchmark measures used in current studies of police citizen contacts—census data, observations of roadway usage, official accident data, assessments of traffic violating behavior, citizen surveys, and internal departmental comparisons—are described. Focusing on the Project on Police-Citizen Contacts, a large-scale data collection effort of traffic stops for the Pennsylvania State Police, four different benchmarks for statewide comparisons are described. The continued improvement of data collection efforts at the local and state levels through the use of multiple benchmark measures is discussed.
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