Stephanie Seguino makes a presentation Monday to the Burlington City Council. Photo by Morgan True/VTDigger
BURLINGTON — Police Department traffic stop data from the last four years show persistent racial disparities in stops, ticketing and searches, according to an analysis by a University of Vermont professor.
The analysis focuses on disparities between black and white drivers because “racial bias typically in the United States, and also in Vermont, is most severe against blacks,” said Stephanie Seguino, a social scientist who teaches economics.
In a presentation Monday evening to the City Council, Seguino said her analysis shows “there is some evidence of (police) targeting black drivers,” particularly black males. There is also some evidence of bias against Hispanic drivers, she said, but the sample size is too small to be conclusive.
The data show that Asian drivers are less likely to be stopped, ticketed and searched than white or black drivers.
Traffic stops provide a number of data points that make them a good proxy for the tenor of police interactions with the community, according to Seguino.
Seguino’s analysis focused on traffic stops where officers have discretion; it excludes traffic stops for warrants, 911 calls or “be on the lookout” alerts. One shortcoming in the data is that Vermont driver’s licenses don’t allow people to list their race, so the officer’s record is based on his or her perception of a driver’s race.
Black people are 4.5 percent of Burlington’s population, yet drivers perceived as black comprised 7.9 percent of drivers stopped between 2012 and 2015. White people are 88 percent of the population and accounted for 87 percent of stops.
When Seguino isolated so-called investigatory stops — those based on an officer’s suspicion of wrongdoing rather than an observed violation such as running a stop sign — the disparity was even greater. Black drivers accounted for 18.8 percent of investigatory stops, close to four times their percentage of the population.
Once stopped by police, the analysis shows, black drivers were more likely than drivers of any other race to be ticketed and searched. Search rates were three times higher for black drivers than white drivers, though police were less likely to find contraband when searching black drivers than when searching white drivers.
“One way to think about that is black drivers are being over-searched. Another way to think about it is possibly that white drivers are being under-searched,” Seguino said.
Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said what he found most troubling is the disparity in warnings versus tickets for drivers of different races. The rate at which black drivers were given warnings was 61.6 percent — nearly 8 points lower than the 69.4 percent rate for white drivers.
“I think a person rolling through a stop sign or changing a lane without signaling, regardless of race, deserves a warning or a ticket at an equal rate,” he said.
The disparity in search rates is “difficult to tackle” because during the four years analyzed there were only 52 black drivers searched, which equates to roughly one each month, del Pozo said. He said he reviewed police reports for all 52 of those searches and found in each case that the stop was based on legitimate probable cause.
“It may be that we’re under-stopping whites, because I don’t accept that the smell of marijuana emits from black drivers’ cars more than white drivers’,” he said.
During that same period only one Asian driver was searched by police in Burlington. The highest search rate was for Hispanics, who were five times more likely to be searched by police, but Seguino again said the number — seven searches — was too low to draw conclusions.
Seguino found that Burlington in most cases had a higher disparity between search rates for black and white drivers than did municipalities in Illinois and North Carolina. Chicago was one city with a notably greater racial disparity.
Vermont State Police also searched black drivers at a higher rate than white drivers, according to Seguino, who is working on analyzing traffic stop data for a dozen police agencies in the state. She has not released her full analysis of state police stop data.
Chief del Pozo said his department — where 2 percent of the officers are black — is taking steps to address the persistent racial disparities in traffic stops, including inviting Seguino to deliver the same presentation she gave city councilors to the police command staff.
Del Pozo said he also plans to publish traffic stop data quarterly on the Burlington police website.
For the first time last month, the department has taken traffic stop data and coded it by officer, so individuals can see their own track record and reflect on their car stop decisions, del Pozo said.
That’s critical because Seguino’s analysis found that some officers demonstrate much greater racial disparity in their stops than others. In a graph showing 77 officers who made more than 80 traffic stops during the four-year study period, the vast majority of those officers stopped blacks at a greater rate than their share of the population.
“I think the whole idea of awareness is critical,” said Hal Colston, founder of Good News Garage, who attended Monday’s presentation.
Colston now runs a nonprofit called Partnership for Change, which is working to address racial bias in educational hiring. He said research by the University of Vermont’s Sylvia Perry, a social psychologist, shows white people are better able to address their implicit racial biases once they’re made aware they exist.
“Having this information in front of people and having them talk about it could only help,” Colston said.
What’s missing from the conversation is qualitative data, he said, or the stories of people of color who feel they’ve been hurt by police bias. Those firsthand accounts may do more to help officers understand the effect their decisions have on people’s lives, he said.
Hal Colston is the founder of Good News Garage and director of Partnership for Change. Courtesy photo
Colston was among a handful of black leaders and community members who attended Monday’s City Council meeting. None elected to speak about personal experiences with police bias during the meeting’s public comment period.
“To be honest with you, I think we’re just tired of telling our story. We’ve been telling it for so long, and for what?” Colston said.
The data Seguino analyzed shows no signs of decreased racial bias in traffic stops. Colston said it’s great that police agencies are now required to collect this data — something that began only in the last five years — but added that it doesn’t appear enough is being done to change police practices.
Having some repository of people’s stories would be helpful, “but to get up in front of a group and relive the pain, we’re just tired of that,” Colston said.
Colston said he’s shared stories several times, in a number of venues, of police treating his sons differently than their white friends, and meanwhile people of color are steadily leaving Vermont because the situation isn’t improving and has remained largely in the shadows.
“Lots of successful people of color have said, ‘I’m not dealing with this for my kids,’ and that’s our loss,” he said.
Colston said his experiences with police in Vermont have led him to believe that most officers have good intentions, but he added that a handful let racist views inform their actions. The result is he’s nervous when confronted by police, he said.
Sharing experiences can’t just be a one-way street, either, Colston said. He said he would like to hear from white police officers who may be trying to change how they interact with people of color.
Colston said he believes Vermont is experiencing something akin to the civil rights movement that the rest of the country went through in the 1960s. The state’s largely homogeneous white population allowed it to observe but not confront many of the same issues decades earlier.
Now, with nonwhites amounting to more than 10 percent of the population in Burlington and Winooski, he said people of color are going to start demanding change, instead of just asking politely. Hopefully leaders in Vermont will recognize that and respond proactively, Colston said.
“People are just sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he added.
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