Editor in Chief, Guohua Li: Congratulations on your study of the Fayetteville Intervention! Would you please briefly introduce yourself, your academic background and the context of your study?
Mike Fliss:我是一个在联合国的公共卫生研究科学家C Injury Prevention Research Center and frequent collaborator with the NC Division of Public Health. I recently finished my PhD dissertation in Epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill (2019), where I focused on social, injury, and environmental epidemiology. Thestudy published in Injury Epidemiologyis a chapter of myPhD dissertationon the measurement, disparities, and public health consequences of law enforcement traffic stops. My dissertation grew naturally out of my volunteerism with my local NAACP branch’s bias-free policing task force. There I met lawyers and community activists looking to promote accountability of law enforcement police and sheriff departments to their local communities.
GL: For most Americans traffic stops are their first interactions with law enforcement personnel and the justice system. What are the different types of traffic stops and how serious is the problem of selective enforcement?
MF: We group traffic stops into three categories. “Safety stops,” including moving violations like speeding or running a light, may make up less than half of all traffic stops in many agencies. “Economic stops” (e.g. broken taillights, driving without insurance or registration, etc.), effectively criminalize poverty. Lastly, “investigatory stops” may ostensibly be to police non-traffic crimes. We include seatbelt stops in this last, most subjective, “investigatory” category. While seat belts are a major public health victory, saving many lives a year, previous research has shown investigatory and seatbelt stops have similar racial profiles in North Carolina.
选择性交通停止执法会带来严重后果。美国司法部在密苏里州弗格森（Ferguson）的报告中承认，有针对性的交通停止计划如何从低收入有色人种社区中提取财富，这是种族资本主义的一个方面。在最极端的情况下，选择性交通停止执法使社区更具越来越大的交通限制的风险 - 桑德拉·布兰德（Sandra Bland），沃尔特·斯科特（Walter Scott）和菲兰多·卡斯蒂利亚停下来。
GL：您能解释一下公共卫生关键种族实践的原则（phcrp）? How did you apply the PHCRS to understand the social dynamics in traffic stops?
MF：尽管我从PHRCP中受益（Ford & Airhihenbuwa, 2010),我不是专家。公共卫生至关重要的比赛Praxis (PHCRP) is a public health framework based on the principles of critical rate theory and anti-racism. It includes four focus areas and ten principles that can guide researchers in study design and evaluation. I believe it should be required reading of any aspiring anti-racist public health researcher or practitioner. I found PHCRP useful to critique the intervention design, the conventional public health framework around traffic stops, and my role as a researcher.
GL: What does the Fayetteville Intervention entail?
MF:Faced with issues ofmotor vehicle crashesanderoded community trust首席哈罗德Medlock自愿请求牧师iew of his department practices and policies by the US Department of Justice. Fayetteville police began collecting GPS data on all traffic stops, publicly selected ten high crash intersections each week for enforcement, and prioritized safety stops to prevent traffic crash fatalities and reduce racial disparities (by relatively deprioritizing other stop types). While interviews suggested these changes represented a significant culture shift at the department, we did not quantify that aspect to the intervention.
GL：评估Fayetteville干预措施的结果指标是什么？
MF：我们评估了四个领域的13项措施，以评估干预措施的影响。这四个领域是（a）traffic stop prioritizationmeasures to provided evidence the intervention was implemented; (B)traffic stop disparity措施评估了改善公平的问题；（C）motor vehicle crashmeasures assessed crashes averted and lives saved; and (D)crime measuresassessed the possibility of a Ferguson Effect (i.e. that a de-prioritization of investigatory and economic stops was associated with an increase in crime).
GL: You used the synthetic control technique in the study. What are the tradeoffs between synthetic control and traditional comparators (e.g., using Greensboro as the comparison group)?
MF: Synthetic control has many benefits when compared to other techniques. The counter-factual synthetic control unit (in this case, a Fayetteville that did not enact the intervention) is created by a weighted linear combination of other control units best matched on the pre-intervention period and, if known, selected time-invariant or time-varying covariates. Those control units in the pool more similar to Fayetteville are upweighted, and those less similar are downweighed. Because of this matching on the pre-intervention outcomes, the synthetic control weights provide some adjustment for the processes, known and unknown, that create pre-intervention variation between control and intervention groups.
但是，综合控制技术比传统模型更复杂，并且应该需要对已知和未知混杂的更明确考虑。它需要仔细的控制选择。如果研究人员没有选择各种控件，并仔细检查了重量矩阵，则技术可能会回归到更简单的单控词（本研究中的一个结果中发生的那样），将一个单位以100％加权并将其他单位加权。
GL: What are the main findings of your study and their implications for traffic safety, social justice and public health?
ML：费耶特维尔的交通停止监管发生了重大变化：安全停止的数量和相对较高的比例增加，2010年在2010年的30％的低点中，每年的停车位均高达80％以上。费耶特维尔的干预措施使交通死亡人数减少了28％，有害坠机事故增加了23％，总坠机事故增加了13％。它还有助于将差异降低，包括将黑人百分比降低7％，而黑白交通停止率率则降低了21％。与弗格森效应假设相反，调查停止的相对去晋升与非交通犯罪结果的增加无关，这些犯罪结果降低或不变，包括指数犯罪（-10％）和暴力犯罪（-2％））。
Our study suggests that traffic stop programs and priorities are highly malleable. Law enforcement agencies who care about public health, equity, and disparities should carefully design their traffic stop programs to save lives and reduce disparities, ideally guided by the consent and active co-design of their communities.
GL: It seems that you attribute the observed effects of the Fayetteville Intervention to re-prioritization of traffic stops. Do you think part of the observed effects is due to the substantially increased intensity of enforcement post-intervention?
ML：这是重要的一点！当然，可以合理地想象停止数量以及与安全相关的停止的比例都会有助于干预效果。我们如何衡量这些结构对于结论很重要：例如，尽管黑人非西班牙裔停止的相对百分比却减少了，但鉴于警察的存在增加，所有人的原始停止数量都增加了。这挑战了降低差异的简单观点。
GL：您的合着者来自几个学科。史蒂夫·马歇尔（Steve Marshall）博士和查尔斯·普尔（Charles Poole）博士是著名且成就卓著的流行病学家。您能告诉我们一些有关弗兰克·鲍姆加特纳（Frank Baumgartner）博士，保罗·德拉玛特（Paul Delamater）和惠特尼·罗宾逊（Whitney Robinson）博士的信息吗？
MF: I have a great deal of appreciation for the mentorship Steve and Charlie gave and continue to give. Dr. Steve Marshall mentored me through many injury epidemiology projects, provided great feedback as chair of my committee, and now provides support as the director of the CDC-funded Injury Prevention Research Center where I work. Dr. Charlie Poole spent many hours one-on-one with me during my PhD coursework, and was one of the first faculty to provide feedback on this project when it was a community public health project, still far from a dissertation idea.
Dr. Frank Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill. He is an accomplished authority on not only traffic stops, but many years of work on racial disparities in the death penalty. Frank worked with me from the beginning of the project and has given me opportunities to support other work on the same topic.
惠特尼·罗宾逊（Whitney Robinson）博士是一位有成就的社会流行病学家。她推出的每篇论文都会发现我发现具有启发性，具有挑战性，鼓舞人心和可行的作用，使我围绕衡量差异以及对种族和种族主义的模型中的种族和种族主义的更好方法和道德规范。
Dr. Paul Delamater is an Assistant Professor in the Geography department with a long focus on the spatial component of public health. His work includes disease modeling and health care utilization. He helped me understand and assess the spatial dynamics in traffic stops.
I want to thank Steve, Charlie, and Whitney in our department in particular for providing advising, mentorship, and support when my first advisor, Dr. Steve Wing, passed away during my PhD. Steve’s community-lead work on environmental injustice and racism in North Carolina influenced not only my dissertation, but connected me to networks of community activists and researchers who enable my continued volunteerism around environmental justice and public health in our state.
GL: Any advice for doctoral students working on their dissertations?
MF: Some doctoral students will have more straight-forwarded projects than mine: projects with more data, perhaps less political or sensitive, with cleaner methods, designed prospectively, with less community controversy and interest. But I cannot recommend enough real-world projects that demand challenging, critical, ethical thinking! If you are taking on a challenging project that might seem more on public health’s periphery, I do have some advice. Peer-support is essential; find those who share your values who will also ask hard questions and keep you accountable. Some projects are harder to fund than others; you may need to balance those projects that fund you and your work with passion projects you most believe in. On a technical note, take care of your dissertation code; I recommend every modern epidemiologist learn about modern repositories and basic software engineering and efficient coding practices lest your dissertation code sprawl into spaghetti code.
Lastly, take care of yourself, and help take care of each other! As a student, though the dissertation defense will one day be over, dissertation work will continue through manuscript revisions and future projects. Be careful of thinking the next rest is just over the next hill. Our work in injury epidemiology involves topics like violent death, structural racism and sexism, and mental health distress. Though we injury epidemiologists may sometimes be abstracted from these lived realities by modeling and math, I think we must engage our humanity in these questions as well, heavy as they are. Taking care of ourselves and each other enables us to better join the analytic and human parts of ourselves in these questions, which makes for better public health for everyone.
GL: Thank you for sharing your work with us! I look forward to reading your next paper in Injury Epidemiology.
MF: Thank you for providing an opportunity to respond to these questions on your blog! I likewise look forward to my next submission to your journal and am thankful for your publishing support.
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