By asking the following questions:
- Did the police continue stopping people for marijuana violations in Colorado during the period after the legalization referendum and before actual enforcement?
- If so, who did they stop?
We wish to explore whether police stops were racially motivated at a time when there were practically no incentives to prosecute alleged marijuana violations. As such, we believe this time frame serves as a propitious natural experiment to observe racial or gender biases as an excuse to pursue inconsequential violations.
For the visualization on police stops regarding Marijuana violations in Colorado, we used data from the Stanford Open Policing Project and a visualization from this D3 source.
Even though marijuana possession was still officially a criminal offense in Colorado from November 2012 to January 2014, the period between the referendum on legalization and the actual enforcement, the number of police stops because of this violation dropped significantly compared to past months.
The decrease in police stops for alleged marijuana violations was consistent across race and gender after 2012. In the following graph, the data shows police stops according to gender in the inverted bottom half of the y-axis and according to race in the upper half. Overall, the proportion of police stops for each group diminished sharply. However, the relative decreases were smaller for Hispanics and women.