Seat Belt Enforcement

Yesterday in the Washington Post, libertarian police-abuse crusader Radley Balko wrote an opinion piece arguing against mandatory seat-belt laws. He opens:

The ACLU of Florida just released a report showing that in 2014, black motorists in the state were pulled over for seat belt violations at about twice the rate of white motorists... Differences in seat belt use don’t explain the disparity. Blacks in Florida are only slightly less likely to wear seat belts. The ACLU points to a 2014 study by the Florida Department of Transportation that found that 85.8 percent of blacks were observed to be wearing seat belts vs. 91.5 percent of whites. The only possible explanation for the disparity that doesn’t involve racial bias might be that it’s easier to spot seat-belt violations in urban areas than in more rural parts of the state... even if it did explain part or all of the disparity, it still means that blacks in Florida are disproportionately targeted.

Here's the problem with that math: the Florida study would in fact be evidence that blacks are failing to wear seat belts at about twice the rate of whites. According to those numbers, the rate of blacks not wearing seat belts would be: 100% - 85.8% = 14.2%, while the rate of non-compliance for whites would be 100% - 91.5% = 8.5%. And as a ratio, 14.2%/8.5% = 1.67, or pretty close to 2 (double) if you round to the nearest multiple.

Now, I actually think that Radley Balko has done some of the very best, most dedicated work drawing our attention to the problem of hyper-militarized police tactics in recent years (and decades); see his book Rise of the Warrior Cop for more. And I'm pretty sensitive to issues of overly-punitive enforcement and fines that are repressively punishing to the poor; back in the 80's I used to routinely listen to Jerry Williams on WRKO radio in Boston, when he was crusading against the rise of seat-belt laws, and I found those arguments, at times, compelling.

But sometimes Balko gets his arguments scrambled up, and this is one of those cases. His claim that there's only one "possible explanation for the disparity" fails on the grounds that these numbers are evidence that, in general, there's actually no disparity in enforcement at all; enforcement tracks the non-compliance ratio very closely. He can do better than to hang his hat in this case on a fundamental misunderstanding of the numbers involved.