Cops told to release race data in stops
AUSTIN — The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement will ask nearly 2,000 law enforcement agencies to resubmit information used to analyze how police were treating minority motorists — but was worthless because the commission did not ask departments to include the race of the drivers in some of the data.
The change comes days after the Houston Chronicle published a story detailing how the information, required by the 2017 Sandra Bland Act, was impossible to use.
“I’m trying to jump on it pretty fast,” said state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, a sponsor of the bill, who said he spoke Monday morning with TCOLE and they had agreed to correct the problem.
Coleman said he also has asked the agency to work with academic experts to ensure the information it is asking of Texas law enforcement agencies can be used to actually conduct racial bias analyses. Alex del Carmen, a criminal justice professor at Tarleton State University who helps train police executives, said he worked Sunday to create a survey that would produce the necessary information.
Coleman said the new list of questions will be used to gather the information for 2020. But he added the agency said it would also contact police departments to ask them to redo their 2019 surveys, originally submitted in March.
A TCOLE spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Texas policing reformers have been trying for nearly 20 years to get the state’s police departments to submit information sufficiently detailed to permit researchers, advocates and the public to identify which police departments treat motorists in a
way that could indicate racial bias. But demonstrating a pattern of racial bias in police departments is deceptively complicated, researchers say.
Many agencies may stop black drivers at a greater rate than their local population numbers, for example. Yet typically half of all traffic stops made by police are of out-of-town motorists, meaning a simple comparison against local demographics is meaningless. Police also say they seldom know the race of a driver before approaching the stopped car on the shoulder of the road, though some studies suggest this isn’t entirely true.
So racial profiling experts say the best test to gauge if a local department is treating black, Hispanic and white drivers differently is to compare how they are treated after a stop, when the driver’s race is clear. The most common way is to compare how often drivers with different skin colors are searched.
Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina, has performed the analysis on hundreds of police departments across the country. His studies found that most searched black drivers at much higher rates than white drivers.
Yet that’s only half the equation, he said. It’s also crucial to then note what police find during the searches.
If they search black drivers at higher rates but consistently find less contraband, for example, that’s an indication officers may be letting a racial bias lead them to treat black drivers as more likely to be criminals.
Texas laws passed in 2001 and 2009 provided basic information to conduct a disparity test. Some departments did the analyses on their own, but many did not.
The Sandra Bland Act, named for the 28-year-old African American woman who died in jail after being arrested during a minor traffic stop, was supposed to fill in the gaps by requiring all departments to send detailed data to TCOLE.
But it didn’t work out that way.
As intended by the new law, TCOLE asked every Texas police department that made traffic stops to submit information about the stops, searches and contraband but then didn’t require them to break it down by the driver’s race — “a crime against public records requests,” Baumgartner said.
After speaking with the agency Monday, Coleman said he didn’t believe the agency intentionally omitted the race information, but rather was confused by the statute’s wording.
The Sandra Bland Act also requires police departments to each analyze its own data for bias patterns, but Coleman said he may also try to require the agency to hire an academic expert to produce an independent analysis instead. “I’ve just got to figure out how to pay for it,” he said.