STAT Chat Seminar
Douglas VanDerwerken of the U.S. Naval Academy will speak on statistical detection of racial profiling by police.
Two recent Massachusetts Supreme Court cases, Commonwealth v. Long (2020) and Commonwealth v. Robinson-Van Rader (2023), have made it easier for defendants to successfully challenge police stops allegedly based on race or another protected class. Such challenges often consist, at least in part, of demonstrating that the racial distribution of those stopped by police differs meaningfully from the racial distribution of an appropriate reference population. Douglas VanDerwerken, Ph.D., associate professor in the Mathematics department at the United States Naval Academy, will describe a series of cases, culminating in Long and Van Rader, that have clarified the legal standard required to mount a successful racial profiling challenge in Massachusetts. He will also discuss the statistical techniques used in each case, including the important choice of the reference population.
Register for the Zoom presentation.
