The Boston Globe recently finished a three-part series on traffic ticket patterns in and around Boston, and found that whites are more likely than minorities to get warnings (rather than tickets) when pulled over by police. Of course, this can’t be shocking to anyone; I’d be willing to wager that the same stats hold true for any large metropolitan area in this country, even after all the hoopla about racial profiling. A few other cool stats came out of the Globe data, though, like an explanation of the effects of getting a ticket on your Massachusetts auto insurance rates, and information about how much cops let you speed before they give you a ticket. (Worrisome in that last set of graphs is that cops in Boston let people speed more than state troopers, even though one would imagine that city police officers are watching over streets with lower speed limits than those patrolled by state officers.)