BPD reported such ridiculously low search rates (1.5 percent of pedestrian stops and 0.5 percent of vehicle stops) that the DoJ became suspicious; they decided to recreate the database from scratch using 14,000 paper incident reports.
What they found was remarkable:
During pedestrian stops, officers searched 13 percent of African Americans compared to only 9.5 percent of other people making African Americans 37 percent more likely to be searched when stopped than other residents.
Similarly, officers were 23 percent more likely to search African Americans during vehicle stops.
During vehicle stops, BPD officers reported finding some type of contraband less than half as often when searching African Americans in only 3.9 percent of searches of African Americans, compared to 8.5 percent of other searches.
Search hit rates during pedestrian stops also exhibited large disparities, with officers finding contraband in only 2.6 percent of African American searches compared to 3.9 percent for other searches a 50 percent difference.
Black people in Baltimore are far, far more likely to be stopped, and they are also more likely to be searched after being stopped but these searches find contraband 33 to 55 percent less often than searches of people of other races.
This strongly suggests that the reasonable suspicion and probable cause thresholds for searching African Americans are less reasonable and less probable than those for other people.
