One of the continuing problems for African Americans is the racist practice of police officers stopping Black drivers at excessive rates. This phenomenon is so well-known that it is called “driving while Black” (DWB). DWB is racial profiling.
Aside from their demeaning effects, these routine stops are a significant first step in encounters between Blacks and police officers, which sometimes lead to the officers’ excessive use of force. Consequently, we must move to reduce, if not eliminate, this racist practice.
In 2020, to establish a means of addressing DWB, the Virginia State legislature passed the Community Policing Act, which, among other changes, mandated that “each time a law-enforcement officer or State Police officer stops a driver of a motor vehicle, stops and frisks a person based on reasonable suspicion, or temporarily detains a person during any other investigatory stop, such officer shall collect specified information.”
This information includes the race, ethnicity, age, and gender of the person stopped, the location of the stop, whether a warning, written citation, or summons was issued or an arrest made, and whether the police searched the person or the vehicle.
Working with the Equitable Policing Coalition in Roanoke City, I analyzed the first six months (July through December 2020) of this traffic stop data for Roanoke City. The analyses showed that the Roanoke City Police Department (RCPD) stopped Black-driven vehicles more often than White-driven vehicles. They stopped Black-driven vehicles at one and one-half times the rate of Blacks in the Roanoke City population, while they stopped White-driven vehicles at only 85 percent of the proportion of Whites in the city’s population.
Further, Black-driven vehicles were more likely to be searched than White-driven vehicles. The police searched Black-driven vehicles at almost twice (1.7 times) their proportion of the population, while they stopped White-driven vehicles only 79 percent of the time. Blacks suffered adversely from the outcomes of the stops, as they were almost two and a half times as likely to be arrested as White Drivers.
The Roanoke City Police Department (RCPD) objected to the findings of our data analysis, even though we used the data they had provided. To counter these factual findings, the RCPD and its analysts decided to use a strange alternative measure rather than the city demographics as a benchmark.
They focused on “bad drivers” only, analyzing the proportion of traffic citations by race compared to all at-fault crash citations by race in the City. That analysis is of little use as it does not address the question of racial profiling or, more simply, differential traffic stops by race.
I have worked with traffic stop data for over 20 years, analyzing all traffic stop data from 13 states and coauthoring a book on racial profiling in 2011 using this data and traffic data we measured in street observations in one city. And I have reviewed a report by the U.S. Department of Justice, “How to Correctly Collect and Analyze Racial Profiling Data.” However, this is the first time I have encountered such a limited statistic addressing the issues of racial disparities in traffic stops.
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services uses the state’s demographics to analyze the statewide data each year. While demographic data are estimates, they are much superior to a sample of bad drivers.
I also obtained and analyzed traffic stop data for the first year of the Community Policing Act-July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021-the last year that included only people stopped while driving in Roanoke City.
This later analysis had similar results to the study of the first six months mentioned above. I computed disparity indexes like DCJS. These indexes indicate the degree to which racial group members were stopped relative to the group’s prevalence in the driving-age population. For traffic stops, Blacks had a disparity index of 1.7, which DCJS calls moderate over-representation, while Whites, at 88 percent, were underrepresented. In searches, Blacks were 2.0, high overrepresentation, while Whites at 77 percent were underrepresented.
The Roanoke City Police Department should and must address the persistent issue of its racial disparities in traffic stops.
