Vermont State Police traffic stop data for last year shows that Black and Hispanic drivers who were pulled over were more likely to be searched and ticketed than white drivers.
“The disparities are still there,” Capt. Garry Scott, the state police’s Fair and Impartial Policing and Community Affairs director, said Wednesday of the data released this week.
“As a state police agency we recognize it,” he said of the disparities. “We’re willing to have these tough conversations.”
The data was released during an online meeting of the state police’s Fair and Impartial Policing Committee.
That panel includes members of the state police, the NAACP, the LGBTQIA Alliance and Pride Center, the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, state residents and others.
“The report is similar to what we’ve seen in the past, disparities continue to exist,” Tabitha Moore, president of the Rutland Area NAACP, said Wednesday.
Moore said that addressing the racial disparities involves looking beyond traffic stops alone.
“We’re still using traffic stop data to look at fair and impartial policing as a whole,” said Moore, who is also a member of Vermont State Police Fair and Impartial Policing Committee.
“As we move forward,” she said, “one of the things that we need to look at is the metric that we’re using to identify how systemic racism or bias are playing a role in creating these statistics.”
Of the 57,921 discretionary traffic stops by the state police in 2019, 93.5% were white drivers, 2.7% Black drivers, 2.1% Asian drivers, 1.5% Hispanic drivers and 0.08% Native American drivers, the data shows.
Those numbers almost mirror 2018 figures showing that white drivers made up 93.6% of traffic stops that year, black drivers 2.69%, Asian drivers 2.1%, Hispanic drivers 1.3%, and Native American drivers 0.08%.
Other numbers highlight the traffic stop disparity.
For example, out of the 54,222 traffic stops of white drivers, troopers conducted searches 0.20% of the time in 2019, compared to 0.60% percent of the time in 2018.
The search rate for the 1,611 black drivers who were pulled over was 0.89% in 2019, more than four times the search rate for white drivers. In 2018, the search rate for Black drivers was much higher at 1.63%, though the disparity was smaller at more than double that of white drivers that year.
The search rate for the 1,222 Asian drivers pulled over in 2019 was 0.25%, compared to 0.41% in 2018. Also, state police reported 868 traffic stops of Hispanic drivers, with troopers conducting searches 1.66% percent of the time in 2019. That compares to a search rate of 1.96% in 2018.
In total, state police searched 137 motorists in discretionary traffic stops in 2019.
According to the report, the “hit” rate, or the percent of time finding contraband during a search, was higher in 2019 for white drivers, at 76.4%, than Black drivers, at 71.4%. The “hit” rate for Asian drivers in 2019 was reported by state police to be 0.00%, with no contraband found in three searches, and 85.1% for Hispanic drivers.
In addition to the search data, state police report that in 2019 white drivers who were pulled over were ticketed 36.6% of the time compared to 42.9% for Black drivers, 49.5% for Asian drivers, 45.3% for Hispanic drivers, and 36.2% for Native American drivers.
Those numbers for 2018 showed white drivers were ticketed 36.2% of the time when they were pulled over, Black drivers 40.1%, Asian drivers 50.4%, Hispanic drivers 42.5%, and Native American drivers 42.2%.
“What it tells me is obviously there is still an issue,” Dr. Etan Nasreddin-Longo, co-chair of the Vermont State Police Fair and Impartial Policing Committee, said Wednesday of the report.
However, he said, he was still looking over the numbers and in search of additional information before drawing more specific conclusions.
“The data needs to keep getting richer, more refined, more specific,” he said. “I feel there is a lot of room here for making this more precise and more than that there is a need.”
Col. Matthew Birmingham, director of the Vermont State Police, said in a statement Wednesday that the data shows more work needs to be done.
“The latest traffic stop data indicate that racial disparities continue to persist,” according to Birmingham. “Our efforts over the past decade to address these disparities, while significant, have not been enough to eliminate them.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: State police traffic stop data shows racial disparities remain .