Hypothesis

What is a Hypothesis? "Hypothesis is a statement about a population parameter developed for the purpose of testing." Today I will discuss a research article on Racial Profiling "Among" the San Antonio Police Department. Two authors, Holly Spencer and Brian Collister, completed the research work. I will identify the hypothesis descried in the article, and explain how the hypothesis statement was used in the study.

The Hypothesis

After reading the article the hypothesis described in the article is that some officers are racially prejudice and target minority drivers. They tend to stop minority drivers more than the others. With the two authors and the help of, "Dr. Dwight Steward, an economics and statistics professor at the University of Texas, the racial profiling data was not accurately reported by police officers." (Collister, B. Stephen, H. 2005) Te study in 2003, the city of San Antonio spent $54,000 in federal grant money to have the police department racial profiling data information analyzed.

One of the first steps in was after requesting and reviewing the data base information a test was performed in which counting the ticket numbers issued from police officers was done using Microsoft Access. In Texas the racial profiling data is required and contains time, the place of the stop, and the race of the driver. Using the actual ticket number was the key to the test, this allowed for more information from the municipal court records. They were able to match more than half the records a total of 154,000 citations in all. After the running several inquiries, the race count of records in the municipal court data compared to the racial profiling data