Finding profiling by police a failure

For 20 years, advocates for law enforcement reform in Texas have pushed for data on traffic stops to shed light on whether police officers treat Black and white motorists differently.

Researchers say the information required to do that isn’t complicated. Police departments should report why each traffic stop was made, whether the driver was searched and what if anything was found — broken out by the race of motorists. The most recent update to the effort, 2017’s Sandra Bland Act, was supposed to accomplish just that.

But the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, the agency in charge of collecting the information, left out one part — the driver’s race.

The result: After two decades and three laws, efforts to identify which of the state’s nearly 2,000 law enforcement agencies have racial disparities in their policing have largely failed, yielding a patchwork of numbers with widely varying degrees of usefulness.

“That’s like a crime against public records requests,” said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina and author of numerous racial profiling studies.

Now, the law enforcement commission (known as TCOLE) says it will fill the holes in the data.

After Hearst Newspapers revealed last month that the information currently collected is all but useless for identifying bias, state officials said the commission will ask law enforcement agencies to submit complete data from now on, including breakdowns of traffic stops, searches and contraband discovered by race of the motorist.

In addition, TCOLE will ask police agencies to resubmit infor