Michael Barrett had a confession.
It was June 1, the day that Attorney General Josh Hawley issued the state’s all over the state.
For 18 years, the report has said roughly the same thing: Driving While Black is a daily Missouri reality.
You won’t reach that conclusion from Hawley’s milquetoast news release. It doesn’t even mention race.
But make no mistake: This year, the disparity between white and black is more stark than ever.
If you are black in Missouri, you were 85 percent more likely to be pulled over by police while driving in 2017. You were more likely to be searched. You were more likely to be arrested, even though you were less likely to be found with any “contraband†after a voluntary search.
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“I have tinted windows,†wrote Barrett on the social media platform Twitter. He’s the director of the Missouri Public Defender’s Office. “I often fail to register my car on time. I have a crack in my windshield. I routinely violate the speed limit.â€
I have tinted windows. I often fail to register my car on time. I have a crack in my windshield. I routinely violate the speed limit. I will likely speed on my way home this evening. I have no concern about being stopped. I have been pulled over once in 25 years. I am white.
— Michael Barrett (@MoDefender1)
For many white Missourians, the vehicle stops report hits with a thud each year.
Like Barrett, it simply doesn’t affect them.
Not so for blacks and Hispanics, who are nearly twice as likely to be arrested as white drivers, even though statistically, they are less likely to be found with contraband.
These numbers, produced year after year, should be cause for action, says Sgt. Heather Taylor, an officer in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Police Department who is president of the .
“The racial profiling numbers as they stand are egregious,†Taylor says. “They’re awful. Post-Ferguson we had the opportunity to do something in this city and this state to show the whole world that we could change for the better. But we haven’t.â€
Taylor was speaking Monday morning at a news conference called by the Coalition for Fair Policing. The organization, which includes as members the ACLU, the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, the Urban League of Metropolitan ºüÀêÊÓƵ and Empower Missouri, hopes to bring attention to the fact that every year when the vehicle stops report comes out, too many public officials allege flaws in the data collection and wave away the thought that any individual officers or departments have a problem with racial bias.
Don’t let them get away with it, says Redditt Hudson, vice president of civil rights and advocacy for the .
The status quo in Missouri, where racial profiling is simply accepted year after year as a matter of course, “is deadly to some and harmful to everyone,†says Hudson, himself a former police officer.
In the recently ended legislative session, the coalition and its partners were pushing for the passage of the which was sponsored by Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin. The bill would have added to the data collected in traffic stops to make it more useful, and would require the attorney general to perform a more robust analysis of the numbers behind the annual report. The bill also would require each police department in the state to develop an anti-discrimination policy and to apply that policy to consent searches. Dogan’s legislation passed the public safety committee in the House 8-1 but never made it to the floor for debate.
It’s a hopeful sign, Hudson says, that “change is possible. Improvement is possible.â€
One change Taylor would like to see is to have police departments in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region adopt a policy similar to one started a couple of years ago in Columbia, Mo. After that city ranked high in the various disparity indexes that are a part of the state’s annual vehicle stops report, its police chief adopted a policy of requiring written consent for voluntary searches. That policy requires police to think twice before asking for a search and also creates a public record.
Black drivers are still searched in Columbia at a rate almost twice as often as white drivers are. But the percentage has dropped each of the past two years since the written consent policy was adopted.
Meanwhile, several municipalities in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region — including Arnold, Chesterfield, Webster Groves and Sunset Hills — showed spikes in the disparity index that indicates officers are either stopping or searching black or Hispanic drivers at rates far out of the norm based on driving population.
In a ºüÀêÊÓƵ region not yet four years removed from months of protest related to conflicts between race and policing, the basic numbers that give a statistical basis to years of anecdotal complaints are in many cases getting worse, not better.
Every municipality I mentioned above will soon be firing off a letter to the editor protesting the flaws in the annual state report that single out their police departments. And they won’t necessarily be wrong, says John Chasnoff, of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. But the answer isn’t to toss out the entire report but pass a law requiring the sort of robust data collection and analysis that will be more meaningful and could lead to improvement in a state that has accepted that Driving While Black is a crime.
“I will likely speed on my way home this evening,†Barrett wrote on the day the vehicle stops report was released. The state’s top public defender isn’t worried. “I have no concern about being stopped. I have been pulled over once in 25 years. I am white.â€