The Missouri Attorney General’s Office today released the annual vehicle stops report, an aggregation of data covering all vehicle stops in the state of Missouri in 2019.
There are several reasons that traffic stops may not be proportionate to the racial/ethnic composition of a jurisdiction. These reasons often overlap and identifying the magnitude of each reason’s effect or separating them from each other is beyond the capability of this report or its underlying data.
The four major sources of disparity identified by scholars are:
· Policing strategies and policies
· Differences in real rates of offending between racial/ethnic groups:
· Subconscious or unconscious biases that can influence the decisions and perceptions of individual
· Explicit bias:
In 2019, the 1,161,680 whites who were stopped accounted for 76.2% of all vehicle stops. Whites comprise an estimated 82.8% of Missouri’s driving age population. Therefore, the value for whites on the disparity index is .92 (.762/.828). Blacks represent 10.9% of Missouri’s driving-age population but 19.5% of all vehicle stops, for a disparity index of 1.79.
Hispanics (0.79), Asians (0.54), American Indians (0.33), and persons of mixed or unknown race (0.71) were stopped at rates well below an expectation based upon their portion of the driving-age population. The values on the disparity index for the different groups can be compared directly to one another by dividing their values. For example, the likelihood that a Hispanic motorist was stopped is 1.46 times that of an Asian motorist (.79/.54).
The report can be found here: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/public-safety/2019executivesummary.pdf?sfvrsn=ec6219f9_4