Report finds disparities in police traffic-stop patterns

Minority drivers were pulled over for equipment violations, like burned-out tail lights, at higher rates than white drivers in most of the eight towns examined in the state’s latest report on racial disparities in police traffic-stop patterns.

The report released Thursday by the Central Connecticut State University Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy focused on the towns of Ansonia, Berlin, Darien, Monroe, Newtown, Norwich and Ridgefield, which were identified in a statewide analysis of more than 90 police departments for having statistically significant disparities in police traffic-stop patterns.

Statistically significant disparities do not constitute proof of racial profiling, researchers said, but justifies taking a closer look.

The report was presented to the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Advisory Board on Thursday. The equipment violations detailed in the report were a common theme during the board’s discussion.

“I cringe every time I hear my dispatcher say the word, calling out the officer, saying it’s ‘noncompliant,’ ” said Madison Police Chief Jack Drumm. “When did we become the bill collectors for town government … for people whose registration hasn’t been done in 90 days?”

Drumm said in over four decades as an officer, he has long been uneasy with the police department’s role in handing out costly fines for violations that don’t immediately impact public safety.

“Some guy, I remember this vividly, going down the road at 73 miles an hour gets stopped for speeding,” Drumm said. “There’s two or three car seats in the beatup car, he’s trying to get to the gate before he won’t be allowed in to clock in for work, and he’s trying to do the right thing and here we are trying put on that person a ticket that’s going to change their life for a period of time and how they feed their family.”

Drumm’s comments struck a different tone from chiefs who have largely limited their past public comments to criticizing the analysis itself, rather than engaging on the policing practices it analyzes.

Researchers who presented the report Thursday said they focused on geography and officer-level behavior to more specifically describe where the disparities were, but the fact that a disparity exists doesn’t mean individual officers are involved in discriminatory behavior. These disparities can show up when enforcement is more concentrated in places where minorities are more likely to be.

In most of the eight towns examined in the report, police conducted the overwhelming majority of their enforcement on a few very busy stretches of road that cross through the town, like the Post Road and Interstate 95 in Darien, Route 7 in Ridgefield, and the Berlin Turnpike in Berlin. These busy roadways generally had more diverse driving populations than their resident populations.