He’s the officer with the most arrests in South Carolina. What can data tell us about him?
The Stanford Open Policing Project, a data journalism enterprise at Stanford University, has been cataloging police traffic stops across the country. Currently, they are are 100 million entries.
One officer in South Carolina makes up almost 30,000 of those entries.
Because the Stanford Open Policing Project, whose data I’m analyzing, encrypted all the police officers’ identities. For the sake of clarity, this officer will be referred to as Officer X is. (More here on why the the Project encrypted police identities.)
However, the data can reveal a bit of information:
- The officer is male
- The officer is white
- The officer is currently 44 or 45 years old
The Project’s South Carolina data spans from 2005 to 2016. During this time period, around 1,800 state troopers made around 90,000 arrests.
To make an arrest, an officer must first stop the accused. From 2005 to 2016, Officer X made stops for three reasons:
- Violation Observed
- Pedestrian
- “Be on the Look Out (Bolo)” Follow Up
Officer X made arrests in 357 locations across 11 counties. He most frequently made arrests along Interstate 20.
Almost two-thirds of Officer X’s arrests were of males. Because of the way the data was collected and entered, there’s no information about the gender identity of those arrested. He also arrested less Black people than white people.
Nationally, Black motorists are arrested at a higher rate than white motorists, according to CNN.
Officer X made the most arrests in 2010. Out of the 3133 people he arrested, over half were white, and half were Black.
If the officer identities were not encrypted, then we’d be able to know the identity of Officer X, and