Driving While Black: The App That Could Save Your Life

It’s a fact of American life that the color of your skin can get your pulled over while driving.

A 2015 University of North Carolina study titled “Driving While Black: It’s Getting Worse” found that black drivers are 31 percent more likely to get pulled over by police, 200 percent more likely to be searched and 190 percent more likely to be arrested after a traffic stop in North Carolina than white drivers.

Those numbers are echoed around the country, where blacks are pulled over and end up in jail at higher rates than other ethnicities.

Meanwhile, police are in a precarious position, in part, because traffic stops are considered one of the most dangerous duties officers perform. It’s also the No. 1 interaction with the public, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. And not every traffic stop is an example of profiling.

But when a stop goes wrong for dubious reasons, it becomes another flash point between two communities. So one group of entrepreneurs have created a smartphone app to deal with drivers who believe they have been profiled on the open road.

The Driving While Black App, which debuted last year, aims to provide lots of information to people before an incident happens as well as when it happens, the developers said this week.

“We want to de-escalate the situation,” said Mariann Hyland, an attorney and co-founder of the app. “We want to empower people with a resource.”