Black drivers 91 percent more likely to be stopped

JEFFERSON CITY, MO.» A report from Missouri’s attorney general shows that black drivers across the state are 91 percent more likely than white motorists to be pulled over by police and newly collected data shows that African-Americans are even more likely to be stopped in many communities where they live.

The Attorney General’s Office for the first time last year collected data on whether people pulled over by police lived in the area or not. That’s significant because law enforcement organizations for years have said that if drivers of color from out of town are pulled over as they commute through a city with a large white population that it could skew a local police agency’s data to make the disparity rate artificially high.

While that appears to be the case in some jurisdictions, the numbers show the disparity is sometimes actually higher when comparing arrests of only resident white and black drivers.

The Missouri NAACP in 2017 issued a travel advisory warning people to be careful while in Missouri because of a danger that civil rights won’t be respected, citing in part the attorney general’s annual report on disparities in police stops.

For example, St. Louis County police were 80 percent more likely to stop black drivers compared to white drivers, when analyzing the total number of police stops. But when only comparing St. Louis County drivers, data show black drivers were more than twice as likely to be pulled over.

In the Kansas City area city of Blue Springs, which is 87 percent white based on 2010 census data and close to Interstate 70, black drivers in general were 275 percent more likely to be stopped. When isolating stops to residents, data show black drivers were nearly three times as likely to be stopped compared to white resident drivers.

“That is worrisome, because now we have a more accurate indicator of disparity because the population base is, if you will, the correct one,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist who analyzed the data for the attorney general’s office.