Of all the many ways that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey abuses his office for partisan ideological ends, the most disturbing by far is his penchant for racial dog whistles aimed at the most extreme edges of the Republican base.
The latest example is Bailey’s unilateral move to fuzzy up a metric of police traffic-stop data that has, for years, clearly highlighted the fact that Missouri law enforcement pulls over Black and Hispanic drivers at far higher rates than it does white drivers.
Bailey’s office is required by state law to produce an annual Vehicle Stops Report, compiling racial data and other information regarding each traffic stop conducted by police officers around the state. The long-running annual report requirement was in response to clear evidence that police were disproportionately targeting minority drivers in stops and searches. Only by collecting and analyzing such data can reform follow.
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Since 2000, the annual report has included what’s called a “Disparity Index†— a presentation of the collected data as a ratio, taking into account the racial makeup of the jurisdiction where the driver was pulled over. That ratio approach gives context to raw traffic-stop numbers that might otherwise mean little to the average reader.
For example, the Disparity Index confirmed that, in 2018, Black drivers in ºüÀêÊÓƵ city were pulled over at a rate six times higher than their representation in the city’s population, while whites were pulled over at rates less than their ratio of the population.
It also showed Blacks were subjected to vehicle searches at higher rates than whites — but that the white vehicle searches more often yielded contraband.
The Disparity Index is a crucial tool but one that, unfortunately, isn’t required by state law to be part of the mandated Vehicle Stops Report.
So Bailey’s office has simply stopped including a context that all of his predecessors over more than the past two decades, Republican and Democrat, have recognized as necessary.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Jack Suntrup reports, Bailey’s office includes an explanation for this omission in the new . It cites problems with the Disparity Index, such as the fact that its driver-to-resident racial ratios don’t take into account whether the driver who was pulled over was from outside the community. That and other factors, it says, “may artificially inflate the disparity index in a given community.â€
No data analysis method is perfect and there are certainly ways the methodology of the index could be updated to account for those issues. But simply throwing out a whole metric that clearly illuminates the scope of racial disparity in traffic stops isn’t the solution. Unless, of course, you’ve already decided that there’s no value in that kind of illumination.
Nothing required Bailey to do this. Just like nothing required him to side in court with a white Kansas City police officer convicted of manslaughter in the , a shocking reversal of his office’s usual role as an ally to local prosecutors.
Nothing required him to improperly insert his office into controversy over the horrific beating of a white Hazelwood East High School student by a Black classmate — a tragedy Bailey baselessly blamed on the district’s racial diversity policies.
And, certainly, nothing required him to take up the banner of three right-wing state senators being sued by a Hispanic man for falsely accusing him on social media of carrying out the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. The man’s life was turned upside down by that toxic slander, but Missouri’s lawyer nonetheless offered up a taxpayer-funded legal defense for his tormentors.
Bailey, a Republican appointed as attorney general to fill a vacancy last year, is seeking election to the post this year. As we have charted in our “Bailey Tally“ — an ongoing compilation of his worst abuses of authority — he has clearly decided that performative culture-war stunts are the best way to stoke up his base.
Race certainly isn’t the only issue on which Bailey shamelessly demagogues, but it’s a core part of his strategy. He never misses a chance to remind his party’s most intolerant voters that, as the state’s top legal official, he will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism at any level. Let alone confront it.