Most 'contraband' found at Texas traffic stops results in no arrest; nearly 50k arrests for Class C misdemeanors in 2023

I had cause this morning to dig around in Texas' 2023 traffic-stop data, so decided to post a few high/lowlights.

This data, published annually in a cumbersome, user-unfriendly spreadsheet by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (see here), only includes arrests, searches, etc. at traffic stops.

After Sandra Bland's death, Texas changed its laws in 2017 to require greatly expanded reporting about police activitiy at traffic stops. Framing this as "racial profiling" data, as the press does, really undersells this dataset: IRL, it's a vast window onto traffic-stop activity with race as only one of many variables.

For starters, it's the only way we even know how many traffic stops are made, since most do not involve citations. Total stops increased nearly 200,000 from 2022 (196,252, or a 2.66% increase), with 7,387,419 stops last year overall. The number of citations written, though, declined by about 12,000 to 2,769,610. So statewide, Texas saw more traffic stops but fewer citations per stop, with officers ending the stop without a citation nearly two thirds of the time.

In 2023, 49,796 people were arrested at Texas traffic stops solely for Class C misdemeanors -- the lowest level criminal offense for which the maximum punishment is only a fine, not jail time. These arrests occurred either for violation of local ordinances or, more commonly, for the underlying traffic violation for which they drivers were stopped. People of course can be and are arrested for other Class Cs -- e.g., "camping" ordinances aimed at homeless people -- outside of the traffic-stop setting.

The number of Class C arrests at traffic stops has been declining (>64k in 2019), but this still represents nearly 50,000 Texans taken to jail for offenses for which the maximum punishment under law does not include jail time. (Before the Sandra Bland Act, police routinely contended this almost never happened -- now we know it's quite common.)

Drivers were searched at about 4.7% of 2023 traffic stops -- 346,846 times. Of these, 23% (80,348) were instances when officers asked for consent to search because they had no probable cause. 

Cops arrested suspects at traffic stops 201,149 times, or at about 2.7% of stops. Taking away the Class C arrests mentioned above and another 54,540 arrested for outstanding warrants (mostly related to unpaid traffic tickets), the rest (96,813) were for alleged violations of Texas' penal code.

But things get squirrelier when we look at contraband discovered. Out of those searches, officers supposedly found "contraband" of some sort 151,123 times, which would give them an impressive "hit rate" of 43.6%.

However, drilling down, we discover that in the overwhelming majority of circumstances when contraband is discovered, the driver is not arrested! That means the "contraband" either wasn't illegal or was an extremely trivial item. Sufficient contraband was found to justify an arrest only 54,422 times, for a hit rate of 15.7%.

Three quarters of the time arrests were made, it was for reasons besides finding contraband -- warrants, Class C violations, or other alleged crimes discovered during the stop.

Use of force in this data set has a few problems, with a couple of departments (Nolanville and Palm Valley PDs, for example) reporting use of force at every traffic stop, which is clearly an error. And the Galveston County Sheriff reported an extraordinary use of force rate -- 574 incidents out of only 12,840 traffic stops -- or 4.4%, which seems either highly unlikely (my guess) or hair-on-fire alarming, if true.

Among larger agencies with more consistent reporting, Houston PD continued to be the big outlier on use of force, recording 3,358 incidents out of 339,715 stops, or nearly 1% of the time (0.99%). That's a lot! The Department of Public Safety used force 2nd most often -- 1,318 times, but made more than 1.375 million traffic stops. So the RATE at which they used force was 1/10th that of the Houston PD. Even so, DPS only reported use of force at 473 stops in 2022, so that's nearly a 200% year over year increase!

While not at HPD levels, use of force rates at the Tarrant County Sheriff (at 0.52% of stops), Midland (0.35%) and Austin PD (0.26%) were also notably high.

Complaints were filed by motorists 4,077 times in 2023, which seems remarkably low. But people probably don't complain because it's pointless. Out of those 4,077, only 4 resulted in sustained complaints that resulted in officer discipline. Out of 7.4 million stops.

Deep in the Weeds: Sandra-Bland data provides first-ever detail on scope of arrests, searches at Texas traffic stops

For reasons Grits fails to understand, neither reporters, academics, nor independent researchers have mined Texas' extensive "racial profiling" dataset extensively, though it's one of the most robust quantitative treasure troves of data on police-traffic stops of which I'm aware, anywhere. To a large extent, new data reported after 2017's Sandra Bland Act (we were given data collection in lieu of a policy ban on Class C arrests) gave us a big-picture overview of what goes on at Texas traffic stops for the first time at a level of detail even experts hadn't seen before.

Your correspondent needed to pull some data this morning for other purposes, so let's dump some interesting, previously un-reported tidbits here.

The Scope of Texas Traffic Enforcement

In 2019, Texas law enforcement officers reported making 9.7 million traffic stops in racial profiling reports submitted to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement.

About 3.9 million of those stops, roughly 40%, resulted in citations. (For reasons no one fully understands, citation totals have been falling for more than a decade.)

Agencies reported someone was arrested at 306,962 stops, or at 3.2% of all traffic stops in 2019.*

A majority of those arrests (168,951) related to penal-code violations. In many cases, officers discovered contraband that triggered these arrests. Seventy percent of all contraband found was drugs or drug paraphernalia.

Avoidable Arrests

Roughly a quarter of arrests at traffic stops (73,911) were for outstanding warrants. These are folks truly suffering from the Debtors Prison Blues:

In addition, 21% of arrests at traffic stops were for Class C misdemeanors (64,100), mostly moving violations and a few arrests for breaking municipal ordinances. These are the arrests that would be eliminated under the George Floyd Act (and should have already been eliminated: similar language was pulled out of the Sandra Bland Act before it passed in 2017). Here's a breakdown of arrests by type:

Police reported using force at .6% of stops, or 60,034 total times in 2019, but use-of-force rates by department varied widely.

Why Do We Search?

In aggregate, Texas cops conducted searches at about one in 20 traffic stops statewide (5.1%), discovering contraband a bit more than a third of the time (34.5% of searches resulted in contraband "hits."). Roughly a quarter of all traffic-stop searches in 2019 (26%) were conducted based on "consent searches" in which the driver gave the officer consent to search. Another 35.8% happened because the officer observed probable cause; and about a third were "inventory searches" or "searches incident to arrest."

This data from the Sandra Bland Act casts new light on what previously was a largely opaque process illuminated only occasionally and momentarily by the release of bodycam video or civil litigation. But the plural of anecdote isn't "data" and until recently, we didn't have department-level numbers to provide insight into local, much less statewide traffic-enforcement practices.

Opportunities

As I look at this heretofore-unreported data, it reinforces the key opportunities for decarceral legislation aimed at traffic stops: The Sandra Bland/George Floyd Act language would eliminate 21% of traffic-stop arrests. Reducing the number of warrants under the Omnibase program would shrink another sizable chunk.

Finally, if drugs make up 70% of contraband found, Grits would expect most of that to be marijuana. So drug-related penal-code arrests could also go down when we see 2020 data because of the Great Texas Hemp Hiatus. (Grits would prefer to see marijuana straight-up legalized, but even tamping down arrests via the new hemp law is an improvement over prior practices.)

Traffic stops are a major, front-end driver of county jail admissions. So anything that reduces how often they result in incarceration also reduces pressure on local taxpayers and avoids adding people to the jailhouse petri dish who might be exposed to COVID.

The newest round of "Sandra Bland" data comes out March 1st, and this time, problems with racial categorizations are supposed to have been fixed. So reporters and researchers should mark that date on their calendar (some agencies have already begun to submit) and set aside time for a deeper dive when that information becomes available. There's a lot of good stuff there.

*A handful of small agencies reported that they arrested someone at every traffic stop. This was clearly an error and those agencies' arrest totals were excluded from this calculation.

Limiting searches would reduce public dissatisfation over police contacts

With the Texas House County Affairs Committee poised to consider racial profiling at traffic stops, Grits went this morning to see if the new triennial police-public contacts survey had been published yet by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, but no dice. The last one available covers 2011. Still, one doubts police-public interactions have changed that much in the intervening five years. Here are a few highlights from that survey:

• White drivers were both ticketed and searched at lower rates than black and Hispanic drivers.
• Across race and Hispanic origin, persons who were searched during traffic stops were less likely than persons who were not searched to believe the police behaved properly during the stop. 
• About 1% of drivers pulled over in traffic stops had physical force used against them by police.
• Of these drivers, 55% believed the police behaved properly during the stop.
• About 6 in 10 persons age 16 or older involved in street stops believed they were stopped for a legitimate reason. [Grits note: That means 40% thought the stop was illegitimate!]
• About 19% of persons involved in street stops were searched or frisked by police. The majority of persons who were searched or frisked did not believe the police had a legitimate reason for the search. 

Traffic stops made up 42 percent of police contacts nationwide in 2011, and most people who thought police behaved disrespectfully at a traffic stop or engaged in misconduct did not file a complaint.

Here's a decent argument from the data for requiring law enforcement to obtain written consent for searches at traffic stops, reviving a bill vetoed by Gov. Perry in a past life (perhaps the Dancing With the Stars contestant will reconsider this position now that he's a born-again Criminal Justice Reformer). That simple change would significantly reduce probable-cause-free searches across the board. Searching drivers at traffic stops when no contraband is found heightens resentment against police: Only three percent of drivers stopped nationally in 2011 were searched, according to this data (in Texas, that number varies widely by department), but 89 percent of drivers who weren't searched thought the officer behaved properly, a number which dropped by nearly a third to 61 percent among searched drivers.

Reflecting on Rick Perry's criminal-justice vetoes

Grits has suggested in the past that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed more criminal justice reform legislation, arguably, than any sitting U.S. governor. And it's true.

It's also true, though, that some of his vetoes have been particularly damaging to the reform cause. The Austin Statesman performed an an analysis of Perry's vetoes and found that 38 of his 301 vetoes have been in the criminal justice realm. Some I agreed with; many IMO were misguided. Several, regrettably, were bills I've worked on. C'est la vie. Anyway, here are what I consider Perry's worst criminal-justice related vetoes:

Maximizing police arrest powers

Photo via The Economist

SB 730 (2001): After the US Supreme Court ruled in Atwater v. City of Lago Vista that Texas police officers could arrest a Central Texas soccer mom for a Class C misdemeanor traffic offense (in this case, a seat belt violation), the Lege passed bipartisan legislation (Chris Harris in the Senate, Senfronia Thompson and Robert Talton in the House) to forbid arrests (with four limited exceptions) for offenses where the ultimate potential penalty would not include incarceration. Perry vetoed that bill and the extra authority he granted peace officers that day in 2001 has been a source of significant mischief, not to mention additional jail overcrowding pressure, in the intervening years.

There was a second veto related to the Supreme Court's Atwater ruling in 2003, though regrettably the Statesman's database misidentified the bill. SB 1597 by Hinojosa was a watered down version that would have required police departments to enact written policies regarding when their officers may effect arrests for Class C misdemeanor violations. Perry vetoed that, too. And his threat of vetoing related bills essentially closed the issue for a decade after the 2003 compromise bill went down.

If the grassroots wing of the GOP had been in ascendance back in '01 and '03 the way they are today, I seriously doubt Perry would have vetoed these bills. But back then the former Democrat was more beholden to the police unions than to small "l" libertarians in his party base. 2005 represented the last session when the governor appeared to openly carry water for them and these "Soccer Mom Bills," as they were dubbed in the media (after the defendant in the Lago Vista case), were high on the unions' hit list in the years following the turn of the century.

Nixing restraints on police search power at traffic stops
Another unfortunate Perry veto in 2005 nixed a requirement that law enforcement obtain written or recorded oral consent before searching a vehicle at a traffic stop unless they had probable cause, in which case they didn't need it. SB 1195 by Hinojosa was good public policy, both informing drivers of their rights and generating more and better data about the murky world roadside searches. When the Austin PD began requiring written or recorded consent, the number of so-called consent searches at traffic stops declined dramatically. This was an excellent bill and Perry's veto was one of my personal biggest political disappointments during his reign.

No to Blue Warrant relief for county jails
I know there are still Sheriffs frustrated with the governor's 2007 veto of HB 541 by Trey Martinez Fischer that would have allowed parole violators arrested on "blue warrants" (an alleged parole violation) to be released on bond awaiting revocation hearings. This is a perennial complaint from counties - that housing the parolees is an unfunded mandate from the state, which is essentially true - and the governor dashed the hopes of many a local official when he throttled this modest assistance to counties to address jail overcrowding.

Don't tell ex-prisoners about voting rights
It still sticks in my craw that Gov. Perry vetoed a bill in 2007 to provide eligible inmates with voter registration information upon release. That seemed like a small thing and his veto motives appeared transparently partisan, especially after the bill was sent to his desk by a Republican-controlled Lege.

Other Veto Errata
Perry famously line-item vetoed the budget for Tony Fabelo's old Criminal Justice Policy Council, ostensibly because Fabelo issued prison population projections that necessitated either spending on prison construction or passing bills to promote de-incarceration. I've never understood why he vetoed Todd Smith's bill exempting Romeo and Juliet relationships (four years difference or less) from sex offender registration statutes - it passed 131-12 in the House, unanimously in the Senate. Perry has also been hostile to good-time credits applied to inmates seeking parole (vetoed bills in '05 and  '07), and in 2005 he insensibly vetoed Jerry Madden and John Whitmire's comprehensive probation reform package, though he signed an essentially similar bill the following session and now takes credit for it on the campaign stump.

* * *

Grits has occasionally dared to hope that the Lege might revisit some of these topics now that we'll have a new governor in 2015.

'Dallas police are finding drug houses by walking up and asking'

It has long amazed Grits how frequently people - both law abiding folks and criminals - give police consent to search, both at traffic stops and in their homes. The Dallas News has a fascinating story ("Dallas police are finding drug houses by walking up and asking," Aug. 25) about:

Source: Dallas Morning News.

how a 3-month-old “knock-and-talk” task force finds criminals.

The task force is part of a renewed effort to target small-time drug dealers after the department reduced the number of undercover detectives dedicated to investigating low-level drug crimes more than two years ago. Police shifted their focus to larger-scale traffickers, but now they blame petty drug disputes for an uptick in murders this year.

Since the 46-member knock-and-talk task force started in May, its officers have made 509 arrests and seized 131 firearms and 404 pounds of drugs, said Deputy Police Chief Christina Smith, who oversees the narcotics division. The task force also has made 399 possible drug house contacts.

“It’s another way to lower crime and to make good arrests that will end up putting and keeping the criminals in jail,” Smith said.

But some experts say knock-and-talks are risky and may yield only the easiest cases.

The investigations rely mostly on neighbors’ tips about unusual activity. Uniformed officers walk up to front doors and ask for permission to go inside. Police record the audio of the conversations to ensure that they have explicit consent to enter.

Consent searches have sometimes been abused at traffic stops, leading several Texas jurisdictions to require written consent to search. In Austin, after racial profiling reports found significant racial disparities regarding who was subjected to consent searches, the department began to require officers to get supervisors' permission before performing them. Over time, once the low-hanging fruit has been disposed of, Dallas may find similar problems with "knock and talk." It's good that they're using their body mics to record consent, but the department should insist that officers continue recording throughout their interactions.

Still, the dynamic is fascinating. Reported the News, "The shift in strategy caused strife among narcotics officers who think the best way to eliminate drug houses is to make undercover drug purchases." But that case is hard to make given the large number of arrests resulting from the tactic. This method seems to lead to plenty of arrests and has the added benefit of generating more confidential informants who may have information about more high-volume distributors.

Radley Balko has described how ubiquitous the use of SWAT teams has become during the routine execution of search warrants in the war on drugs, but Dallas cops are finding that, if they show up and ask nicely, plenty of suspects will invite them in the front door. Given that reality, couldn't the use of SWAT teams to execute routine search warrants be diminished? It seems like the risks have been dramatically overstated.

Dallas PD to document consent to search at traffic stops

Thomas Paine admonished that time makes more converts than reason, and that's certainly been the case with law enforcement policies related to consent searches. In 2005, Governor Perry vetoed legislation requiring police to get written or recorded consent for vehicle searches at traffic stops if they didn't have probable cause. Now, Dallas is about to become the latest Texas city to adopt such a policy anyway. Reported the Dallas News ("Dallas police to get written or recorded consent before searches," Feb. 12):

A new Dallas police policy that requires officers to obtain recorded or written consent for consensual searches could be in place within two weeks, Chief David Brown said Monday.

The policy is one of several initiatives that Brown announced in the summer following a string of shootings involving police, including a fatal shooting of a suspected drug dealer that nearly sparked a riot in the Dixon Circle community of South Dallas in July.

Brown made the announcement during a City Council Public Safety Committee meeting on Monday. He said many of the racial profiling complaints the department receives each year are tied to traffic stops involving a search.

He said that even though fewer than 5 percent of all traffic stops result in a search, “perception-wise, racial profiling really boils down to a person wanting to know, ‘Why did I have to be searched given I was just stopped for a traffic stop?’”

The policy will apply to all forms of consensual searches without warrants, though it is likely that it will more commonly come into play in cases involving vehicle searches.

Austin PD last year reinstated a written consent policy that had been enacted several years before then was quietly scuttled. The policy was brought back last summer to counter recurring allegations of racial profiling: In 2011, one in eight traffic stops by Austin police involving black folks resulted in searches compared with one in 28 among white people.

Kudos to Dallas PD on taking this step and let's hope other jurisdictions follow suit.

Written consent for vehicle searches and déjà vu at Austin PD

Grits was pleased to read that, starting next month, the Austin Police Department will require officers to obtain written consent for searches at traffic stops when they don't have probable cause, and to notify drivers they have the right to refuse. See coverage from the Austin Statesman, the Austin Chronicle, and a Statesman editorial out today. However, the news left me with an odd sense of déjà vu.

I was under the impression this was already the policy in Austin based on prior media reports. E.g., here's a 2005 UPI story which mentioned that "When the Austin Police Department recently began requiring written consent to search a vehicle at a traffic stop, the number of consent searches dropped by more than 60 percent." In 2006, the Austin Chronicle's Jordan Smith reported that, "The APD already requires officers to get written consent," though her most recent story didn't mention it. See also this Grits coverage based on a Statesman account that's no longer online. Indeed, at one point Grits even posted a copy of the written consent form (pdf) APD was supposedly using (which the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition obtained under an open records request).

One tidibit about the new/old policy remains unclear: The Statesman reported that it applies only to "vehicle searches," while the Chronicle reported that it would apply during any stop - "traffic, cyclist, or pedestrian." (Since most searches of pedestrians and cyclists are so-called "Terry frisks" performed ostensibly for officer safety, it's hard to envision precisely how written consent would work.)

In any event, the supposedly new policy was announced after the release a report by the Police Monitor finding that one in eight traffic stops by Austin police last year involving black folks resulted in searches compared with one in 28 among white people. The Chief clearly felt the need to counter bad publicity and almost immediately reacted with this policy "change."

My question(s): Was the earlier written-consent requirement a) erroneously reported or b) eliminated without publicity between then and now? If the latter, why, and by whom? I suppose there's also an option "c": That the chief cynically re-announced an existing policy to deflect criticism based on the latest Police Monitor's report. ¿Quien sabe? Maybe if the Police Monitor report says the same thing next year, he can announce it again.

Indeed, coverage of this news has been decidedly bereft of historical context. The Statesman editorial mentioned that "The notion of written consent is not new. Legislation that would have required officers to obtain a written permission to search vehicles was introduced in the 2009 session but encountered resistance from police groups and died." But in fact, legislation to require written consent for searches at traffic stops has been filed at least since 2001 (back then, by then-state Rep. Domingo Garcia, who's presently in a runoff battle for a DFW-area Congressional seat). In 2005, Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa and Rep. Harold Dutton pushed through a requirement that consent for searches at traffic stops be written or recorded; the bill passed both chambers of the Texas Legislature only to be vetoed by Governor Perry at the behest of police unions.

Grits will attempt to sort this out but the MSM coverage so far raises more questions than answers.

MORE: See more coverage from The Daily Texan.

AND MORE: I forwarded this post to Austin's Police Monitor Margo Frasier who replied thusly:

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you for sure when APD abandoned the written consent form and began to rely on audio/video consent.  From looking at General Orders, as early as March, 2006, they allowed an officer to record consent on audio/video instead of having the person sign a consent form.  The consent form was to be used if the "consent" was not recorded on audio/video.  The same policy continued when APD redesigned its policy manual and began using "Lexipol" in August, 2011. 

One of my many concerns is that APD has been deficient in following the current policy.  For example, in 2011, 68% of the searches were non-consent (probable cause or incident to arrest), 6% (actually 5.9%) were consent, and 26% were "unknown".  In other words, the APD told the State of Texas in its Racial Profiling Report that it doesn't know whether the search was due to an arrest, probable cause, consent, or, I would suggest, unlawful due to not being based on one or more of the first three listed.  Additionally,  I do not know of a single case (during my time here) in which an officer has been disciplined for not following the Search and Seizure policy requiring either audio/video consent or written consent.  My hope is that APD not only issues a clear policy of requiring written consent, but also follows it up with training, and, if necessary, discipline. 

You bring up the issue of "Terry frisks." Although I know that you are knowledgeable in these things, some of your readers may not be.  The term "Terry frisks" comes from the Supreme Court decision Terry v. The State of Ohio and are to be used in a limited circumstance.  It is be a protective frisk based on reasonable suspicion.  In other words, it is to be a frisk limited to patting the outer surfaces of a person's clothing in an attempt to find weapons.  However, it is only supposed to occur when an officer can otherwise justify stopping the person and has a reasonable fear for his/her safety...not as a pretext to search the person for evidence of a crime such as possession of drugs.

Austin police gave 26% fewer traffic tickets in 2011

It turns out Austin's decline in the number of traffic tickets given out last year was even greater than Grits had supposed according to the city's recent racial profiling report (pdf), which I noticed via this story by Patrick George in the Austin Statesman. Grits has earlier reported that tickets processed in municipal court in Austin had declined from roughly 233,000 to 205,000 from 2010 to 2011 - part of a statewide trend.

The racial profiling report shows Austin officers last year gave far fewer tickets last year. "Austin police officers made 179,882 motor vehicle stops in 2011 compared to 232,848 in 2010," according to the city's racial profiling report. One caveat: That's comparing calendar year to calendar year whereas the Office of Court Administration is measuring the fiscal year (September to August).

Still, that's an amazing 26% fewer tickets from year to year! Said the report: "Overall, the number of stops is lower in 2011, in part, because the Highway Enforcement Command shifted its mission from citywide traffic enforcement to a focus on the major highways such as IH-35, MoPac and 183. As a consequence, the number of traffic citations declined from 224,662 in 2010 to 165,757 in 2011, a 26% reduction. The overall number of motor vehicle stops also decreased by 23%." That has trickle down effects at the jail and throughout the court system because so many arrests originate at traffic stops.

Austin also saw the number of consent searches at traffic stops decline last year, from the highest total since they began tracking in 2010 (19,519) to a more modest 2011 total (11,719)), for a 40% drop.

I went to check the same data source for other cities and was disappointed to see this on the TCLEOSE website: "Note: The link to the 2010 Racial Profiling reports from the TCLEOSE website is no longer available on-line, but may be purchased for $35 (CD disk) through Open Records Request." That's pointless. How much space does it take to archive past years' reports for comparison? I might go ahead and get a couple of years worth for comparison purposes, but that's gratuitous. At least leave the last 3-5 years of reports online to supply some context for the annual data.

• Most larger Texas police departments wrote fewer traffic tickets in 2011
• Why are Texas cops writing fewer traffic tickets?

Minority drivers in Austin searched more than twice as often as whites

Here's a notable excerpt from the latest annual report (pdf, pp. 20-22) from the Austin Police Monitor arguing that racial profiling at traffic stops isn't driven by officers choosing to pull over more drivers of a certain race, but rather what happens at the traffic stop after the officer has detained them:

In March of 2011, APD published its 2010 Racial Profiling report. In this report, APD stated that Blacks/African Americans were stopped 28,949 times; which is 12% of all traffic stops and, therefore, fairly in line with this group’s representation of the total Austin population. But, in that same report, it is noted that Blacks/African Americans were searched 4,356 times, or 22% of all searches. Based on the APD report, Blacks/African Americans were searched one out of every seven times a member of this group was stopped.

This same report shows that Hispanics/Latinos were stopped 68,327 times, or 29% of all traffic stops. This percentage of stops is actually slightly less than this group’s representation in the population (35%). Still, this group was searched 8,140 times, or 42% of all searches. Based on the APD report, Hispanics/Latinos were searched one out of every eight times a member of this group was stopped.

Caucasians (“White” in the table below) were stopped 127,661 times, or 55% of all traffic stops. This percentage of stops is actually slightly higher than this group’s representation in the population (50%). Caucasians were searched 6,724 times, or 34% of all searches. Based on the APD report, Caucasians were searched one out of every nineteen times a member of this group was stopped.

The APD has long held that it does not pull people over based on their race/ethnicity. This assertion holds true when looking at the data on stops. Despite this, the data does indicate that after the stop, a clear disparity emerges. This disparity is not who is being stopped nor in the number of stops, but rather what occurs after the stop. Blacks/ African Americans are almost three times (2.71) as likely as a Caucasian to be searched while Hispanics/Latinos are over twice as likely (2.37) as a Caucasian to be searched.

APD calls the finding of some form of contraband a “hit.” Again, looking at APD’s 2010 Racial Profiling Report, it can be seen that searches of Caucasians yielded a hit in 27% of searches. For Blacks/African Americans, the hit rate was 32% despite being searched almost three times as often as Caucasians. The hit rate for Hispanics/Latinos was 28% despite being searched over twice as often as Caucasians. Even with the disparity in search rates, there is actually a slight difference in the amount of contraband found as a result of a search.

These numbers clearly show that searching Blacks/African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos more often does not yield a significantly higher hit rate; therefore, the practice seems futile and calls any justification of it into question.

That's a remarkable disparity, and to think it was even worse before Austin PD began requiring written consent at traffic stops. Even after that reform, Hispanics and blacks are still searched at traffic stops in Austin one out of seven and eight times, respectively, compared to one in 19 times for white folks. Given there's no significant difference in the "hit rate" for finding contraband, those ratios are difficult to explain away with a race-neutral interpretation. Can you think of one, or is this a case of systemic discrimination?

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Time to implement written consent at traffic stop searches
• Dutton: Require written or recorded searches at traffic stops
• Written consent protects Texans' rights and prosecutors cases
• House vote count on written consent
• 'Strange coalition' backs SB 1195
• NYPD to require written consent for traffic and home searches
• Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops
• Don't mind if I take a look, do ya?
• Police oversearching not all about race
• Austin drivers refuse searches when they know they can
• How often do drivers refuse consent searches?

Central repository for TX racial profiling reports now online

Here's something cool: For the first time in a decade since Texas' passed its racial profiling statute, all the racial profiling reports from local agencies have been compiled in one place and put online. This is long overdue. For a number of years before the state created a central repository for this information, I helped analyze the data at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, where Molly Totman performed yeoman's service to compile information on a nonprofit basis that really should have been a government function. Now, finally, thanks to a floor amendment to Sunset legislation by Sen. Royce West in the waning days of the 81st legislative session, the public can access this information in one spot online. Brilliant!

The formatting of the reports isn't the easiest to interpret and isn't always consistent from department to department, but there's a lot of data here. Often the most important racial disparities show up not in the proportion of driver stopped but in what happens after the driver has been pulled over: Take Austin PD, where black folks made up 12.4% of all traffic stops (roughly the same as their proportion of the population), but 22.3% of people searched at traffic stops.

For that matter, agencies exhibit widely disparate patterns in how they approach searches in general, particularly how frequently so-called "consent searches" are used. At the Austin PD, for example, just 5.7% of searches conducted were consent searches, while at Houston PD they made up 30.4%. At some agencies it's much higher. In Irving, a majority (55.8%) of searches were consent searches. When I have more time, I may look more closely at disparities in how frequently consent searches are used. Some departments seem to be pushing them pretty aggressively.

West's amendment also added a new datapoint - whether the officer new the race of the driver before they pulled them over - that appears to vary widely from department to department, for reasons I don't fully understand.

The reports would be a lot more probative if data on searches were correlated by race of the driver, particularly breaking out consent searches (i.e., searches where an officer has no reasonable suspicion to search and is required to ask permission). Then you're specifically analyzing circumstances where officers are exercising discretion, whereas the reporting now conflates categories in a way that makes it impossible to draw firm conclusions about whether disparities are structural or volitional.

One thing that having a state agency compile the reports brings to the forefront that was obvious when compiling the reports in years past: Some agencies aren't complying with the law, don't compile racial profiling data, or at least are unable to produce their required annual report upon request. By region, the compliance rate among departments required to report ranged from 68% in the Panhandle to 100% in Northeast Texas. All told, 383 agencies required to report didn't do so.

Maybe now that the data doesn't require hundreds of separate open records requests to compile (!), we'll see more academic interest in analyzing the data. This statute provides a lot of ground-level data about what officers are doing on the street that, while initially gathered for purposes of assessing racial profiling, implicates quite a few pressing Fourth Amendment questions and other non-race related issues as well. Texans spend a lot money on law enforcement, and these reports provide lots of raw, department-level information for analyzing police practices that wouldn't otherwise exist.

These reports were always meant for locals to be able to easily access data on traffic stops by their local law-enforcement agencies, so it's gratifying that, for the first time, they're available to everyone instead of just to a few insiders who took the time to hunt for the information.

Consent to search your car lets police dismantle stereo system

A couple of quick Fourth Amendment items via Liberty and Justice for Y'all:

First, the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that when a driver gave DPS troopers consent to search his vehicle, they were justified in taking out a screwdriver and dismantling his car speakers on the side of the road to look for drugs.

Also from LJ4Y we get a good roundup of discussions on a SCOTUS case, City of Ontario v. Quon, an electronic privacy case in which oral arguments were heard this week. My own views on the degradation of the Fourth Amendment were well stated by Jamie Spencer over at the new Affirmative Links group criminal defense blog, so I'll refer readers to his essay rather than replicate his fine efforts.

ASIDE: FWIW, this is officially the 5,000th post on Grits for Breakfast since the blog was launched in October 2004. Thanks for reading.

Central repository created at TCLEOSE for racial profiling data

Here's a happy tidbit I'd missed that the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's Ana Yañez Correa tells me was amended to the TCLEOSE Sunset bill (HB 3389) in the final days of the session:

Texas finally created a central repository for compiling and comparing local racial profiling data gathered by police officers at traffic stops. TCLEOSE will create rules and data reporting standards so we'll no longer have this bizarre situation where every department, conceivably, can have its own definitions of all the terms they're supposed to report.

The last-minute amendment to HB 3389 added several reforms long sought by those of us who've used the data up close and personal, but the Lege refrained from expanding reporting beyond stops where traffic tickets are issued, and they still won't require most departments to gather data on whether vehicle searches yield contraband.

That said, it's a big deal that they centralized reporting, created penalties for non-compliance, and that reporting by local departments will become standardized over time as a result of TCLEOSE rulemaking. That's all good news and something that's been needed for quite awhile. I thought for sure this deal was cut in 2005 but it fell through by the end of session.

I heard through the grapevine the Texas Municipal Police Association lobbied the Governor to veto the TCLEOSE Sunset bill because it included the central repository: It's possible the reason Rick Perry didn't oblige them was that Sen. West and other supporters took half a loaf on strengthening the data collection requirements. Quien sabe? I'm glad they got as much as they did!

The legislation relieves the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition of its long-time de facto role as Texas' central repository of racial profiling data. For years Molly Totman gathered the information annually through open records requests; she and statistician Dwight Steward compiled a database that has now served that purpose for many years. I'll bet Molly will be happy to see that TCJC function retired and passed along to a state agency, which is where the responsibility arguably should have been in the first place. Though I could swear on a stack of Bibles they were always super-straight with the data, some police departments were suspicious of results even though they could doublecheck them from their own reports. A state agency's numbers will inherently be more trusted.

Next session, the Lege should consider moving the data elements about contraband and arrests into the "mandatory" section of the law (CCP 2.132) and eliminating the other "optional" data elements (required only of agencies that don't have video in their patrol cars that did not receive funding in a long-ago bond election).

Having evaluated this data closely for what it can and cannot usefully show, I think the contraband hit-rate information is vital for giving police supervisors, civilian officials and the public a clear idea of whether consent search tactics are a good use of police officers' time and focus.

When Austin PD first compiled that data, they discovered police were seeking consent searches from black drivers more than five times as often as whites but were finding contraband on white drivers twice as often as black drivers who were searched. As a result, the city ultimately moved to requiring written consent for all searches at traffic stops where officers don't have probable cause. The number of searches declined dramatically, but there's no evidence that's caused some new uptick in crime.

That contraband data is still "optional" for agencies that have in-dash video in their vehicles (in fact, Austin PD quit reporting contraband hit-rate data), but that's the most interesting and probative aspect of this information, by far - both for the public to understand the impact of departmental search policies and for supervisors to measure the productivity of how their officers are spending their time. If departments must gather and report so-called "racial profiling data," anyway, we may as well get the most possible bang for the buck.

In the meantime, congrats to state Sen. Royce West and his staffer Kelvin Bass who've been pushing for this central repository now for many moons.

Time to implement written consent at traffic stop searches

Can Texas drivers really refuse "consent" to seach at traffic stops when police officers have the ability to arrest them, even for the most minor traffic violation if they refuse comply? That's the question posed by Rep. Harol Dutton's HB 917, which would require written or recorded consent for searches at traffic stops without a warrant or probable cause.

The bill was up in the House Public Safety Committee yesterday. (See the video here beginning at the 2:43:45 mark.) I've supported this idea for years and think it would be a big improvement over the status quo.

Critics of the legislation were allowed to testify first. A CLEAT lobbyist called the legislation a bill with "evil intent," because he claimed it assumes all officers are intentionally violating the rules. I thought that was a completely bogus argument. You could just as easily say that laws against murder assume all citizens may be murderers. That's obviously not true - such laws are established to handle rogues and outliers, not workaday officers who follow the rules. Rep. Dutton later made the same point.

Also speaking in opposition to the bill, Tom Gaylor of the Texas Municipal Police Association argued that Texas' exclusionary rule could mean inadvertently unrecorded consent might be excluded. However, Rep. Stephen Frost pointed out that in a he-said-she-said situation neither side could definitively prove what happened unless there's a recording or written documentation. In fact, that's the reason the Texas prosecutors association prefers written consent according to their manual on "Traffic Stops."

Surprisingly, Gaylor opined that coercive police tactics have declined since Texas' drug task forces were disbanded! I thought that was a particularly telling admission since Gaylor and TMPA for years opposed efforts to rein in rogue drug task forces. Now he's holding up reforms he earlier opposed as a reason not to implement further good-government bills. I like Tom Gaylor, but I'd find his testimony more credible if he'd supported significant reform legislation on these topics in the past.

Joe Saldaña, a rep from the San Antonio police association was similarly disingenuous. He didn't like the idea that a police officer must inform the driver they had the right to refuse consent. But what's exactly wrong with informing drivers of their constitutional rights?

Dozens of Texas police agencies already require written consent and despite the chicken little rhetoric, the sky didn't fall when they implemented it.

When Austin PD implemented written consent, the number of consent searches declined by 63%. That indicates to me that a lot more Texans would exercise their right to refuse a search if their rights were explained to them.

Saldaña complained that officers with "reasonable suspicion" to search would be inhibited from searching, but that's just false. If an officer identifies "reasonable suspicion" at a traffic stop, they can search already under current law without consent. This proposal only address instances in which they do not have "reasonable suspicion." That claim was a false, obfuscatory argument that has no credible basis in the real world.

Scott Cisco of the Houston Police Department also opposed the bill, claiming written consent might still be contested in court over the issue of "voluntariness." However, there's no doubt a written consent form would put the prosecution in a much stronger position, not a weaker one. Indeed, the prosecutors' association manual on traffic stops said written consent is "preferred" precisely because it avoids swearing matches later in court.

Finally, Matt Simpson of the ACLU of Texas argued audio-video documentation would save a lot of time in court because it would eliminate future claims that consent was coerced, eliminating pretrial hearings that cost the state time and money. He saw nothing wrong with a trade-off that created better evidence while simultaneously informing citizens of their rights. If there's a reduction of consent searches, he said, it would encourage officers to pursue actual crimes instead of merely engaging in fishing expeditions.

In his closing, Dutton emphasized that defense attorneys would find themselves at a major disadvantage in court if a defendant had signed a written consent form, and the prosecution would benefit most. He also pointed out that racial disparities among consent searches were exceptionally high - in some jurisdictions blacks are subjected to consent searches 3-5 times more often than white folks, or even higher.

This is an excellent and much-needed bill, though it was vetoed in 2005 by Governor Perry under pressure from these same prosecutors and police unions. It's still needed, though - the problems that first spawned the proposal certainly have not abated

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Dutton: Require written or recorded searches at traffic stops
  
• Written consent protects Texans' rights and prosecutors cases
• House vote count on written consent
• 'Strange coalition' backs SB 1195
• NYPD to require written consent for traffic and home searches
• Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops
• Don't mind if I take a look, do ya?
• Police oversearching not all about race
• Austin drivers refuse searches when they know they can
• How often do drivers refuse consent searches?

Dutton: Require written or recorded consent for traffic stop searches

On Monday, the Texas House Public Safety Committee will hear a particularly star-crossed piece of legislation by Houston state Rep. Harold Dutton, HB 917, which would require written or recorded consent for police to search personal vehicles at a traffic stops without probable cause.

This is an identical version of a bill that passed 29-2 in the Texas Senate and 96-41 in the House back in 2005 but was inexplicably vetoed by Governor Rick Perry. Since then we've seen numerous situations, most recently in East Texas, where police have abused their search authority.

I've written so much about this same legislation in the past, for now let me simply endorse the bill enthusiastically and link to past, related Grits coverage if you'd like more detail on the subject:

• Written consent protects Texans' rights and prosecutors cases
  
• House vote count on written consent
• 'Strange coalition' backs SB 1195
• NYPD to require written consent for traffic and home searches
• Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops
• Don't mind if I take a look, do ya?
• Police oversearching not all about race
  
• Austin drivers refuse searches when they know they can
• How often do drivers refuse consent searches?

NYPD to require written consent for traffic and home searches

Grits' coverage on the topic of "consent search" reforms - i.e., requiring written or recorded consent for warrantless police searches - pretty much petered out with the veto by Governor Perry of legislation requiring it in 2005. The following session, Perry's renewed veto threat kept the bill from even getting a hearing, though several dozen departments statewide enacted policies of their own accord.

Outside of Texas, however, pragmatic concerns are causing more departments to require written consent, most recently the largest police department in the country in New York City. According to New York Newsday:

The initiative was put in place because consent searches are often challenged at trial - and jurors too often believe the suspect's claim that police never got permission to conduct the search, police sources said. ... In one case, a federal judge said he found it 'wholly plausible' that a sergeant forced his way into a Bronx apartment to conduct a search despite the sergeant's contention otherwise.

Via Drug War Rant.

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops
• Don't mind if I take a look, do ya?
• Police oversearching not all about race
  
• Austin drivers refuse searches when they know they can
• How often do drivers refuse consent searches?
• UNT Academics: Centralize, standardize racial profiling data
• Police don't want to improve racial profiling data

If you had 1,200 pounds of marijuana in the back of your semi, would you consent to a police search?

Supposedly this guy did, but it sounds really unlikely to me.

If Governor Perry hadn't vetoed legislation in 2005 requiring written or recorded consent for searches at traffic stops, it would be possible to know for sure.

Video of police encounters would reduce perjury

Police Perjury: "Judges let it slide. Prosecutors often encourage it," says Steven Gustitis, a criminal defense lawyer from Bryan, Texas blogging at The Defense Perspective. He laments Gov. Perry's veto of a bill in 2005 that would require written or recorded consent at traffic stops, legislation I wrote about quite a bit on Grits. Writes Gustitis:

I can't count how many times clients told me about the police searching their vehicles without consent, but the police report showed the officer's justification for the search was consent. Had these encounters been video taped I bet we'd have beaten some of those searches. However, since nothing was recorded it was always my client's word against that of the officer. Who do you think the judge and prosecutor believed?

Prosecutors seek to justify no-consent searches after the fact

A telling back on forth on the Texas District and County Attorneys' discussion board began with a prosecutor from Vernon citing the following facts, asking his colleagues to help him argue why a non-consent search at a routine traffic stop was justified. Here's the prosecutor's rendition of what happened:

Defendant was pulled over for traffic stop. Officer ran her name and a felony warrant came up from Oklahoma. Officer pulled defendant out of car. He told defendant that she had an outstanding warrant. Defendant says, "that is not me, it must be my sister. She is always using my name." Defendant was very nervous when asked about narcotics. (She had a previous POM arrest.) She requested that she be allowed to get back in her car and sit down.

Officer was awaiting confirmation of the warrant and agreed to let defendant get back in car. He searched the lunge area of the vehicle (without consent) and found a tin can with some baggies of methamphetamine under the driver's seat. He arrested defendant for POCS. When he returned to his office he got the pictures from the Oklahoma warrant that was issued in defendant's name and it turned out that it was actually defendant's sister.

The officer was acting in good faith and believed that defendant had an outstanding felony warrant when he initiated the search. It must be a good search, right?

Read the entire two-page discussion string and tell me what you think. Several opinions were offered that frame the topic:

Our friend John Bradley, the Williamson County DA who never met a search he didn't like, opined that it "sounds like a reasonable search. And that is the standard. An officer need not be right ever time, only reasonable," he said.

That was definitely the answer the original prosecutor was looking for; he thought the reasonable suspicion standard had been met because of the "felony warrant, nervous behavior, previous conviction for POM, her denial of the same, the reality that illegal weapons are often associated with drugs." A Brazoria County prosecutor, though, wasn't so sure:

You said the officer told her she had a warrant, let her back in the car, waited on confirmation, and at the same time did a nonconsensual search of the "lunge area"? What exception to the 4th amendment warrant requirement are you going to use? It is not a search incident to arrest because he never told her she was under arrest and let her back into the car. There is no consent. I don't think you get to the reasonableness of the search (which I agree was reasonable based on the officer's good faith) until you can prove an exception to the 4th amendment warrant requirement.

A Gainesville prosecutor similarly considered the search questionable:

The automobile exception does not apply, since the officer did not have probable cause to believe the vehicle contained evidence of a crime at the time of the search. Thus, I agree that the search must be justified as being similar to the situation in Terry. Merely by asking to be permitted to sit in her car, it does not seem the suspect was encouraging a search. If the officer was in fear of weapons, he should have denied the request or asked for consent. I also disagree that opening a small, opaque container on the prospect it might present a dangerous item is very reasonable.

A non-attorney posting on the string mentioned that it sounded like the officer was searching for drugs instead of a weapon, but that didn't deter the original prosecutor, who concluded:

adding it all up, a felony warrant, two lies to the officer, a previous arrest for POM (and a lie about that), excessive nervousness, combined with hesitation and a non-committal statement on the presence of contraband in the car, gave the officer probable cause to believe that there would in fact be contraband in the car. I think the Terry stop argument is a good one as well as the tin can was big enough to hold a weapon.

You know, I don't have any problem with Terry frisks. What bugs me is when officers perform a questionable search without consent, then a bunch of lawyers sit around jawing after the fact about what legal theory they can use to justify it.

In the end, the Vernon prosecutor chose "all of the above" for his reasons, even when they were contradictory. The officer could have thought there was a gun in the opaque tin, he says, but he also had cause "to believe there would in fact be contraband in the car." So what was he searching for, a gun or drugs? And if he's searching for a gun, the Legislature just clarified the law to say it's legal to carry a firearm in your personal vehicle so long as it's not in plain view and the person is an otherwise legal gun owner.

It's one thing for officers to exercise lawful authority at a traffic stop, and quite another for them to bully drivers, do whatever they want including search without consent, then feel confident that prosecutors will manufacture some cockamamy legal interpretation to justify whatever they do. That's exactly what the prosecutors are doing on this discussion string.

Some of you legal eagles in the crowd let me know your opinion: Was this a legal search, or did the police officer cross the line?

New York Times spotlights report on guns, traveling and the Texas Lege

I was quoted in the New York Times this morning on the topic of prosecutors who continued to pursue weapons cases against Texas drivers in contradiction to HB 823 passed last session ("Unusual allies in a legal battle over Texas' drivers gun rights"). Reporter Ralph Blumenthal was particularly interested in the "strange bedfellows" aspect of the dispute, with the Texas State Rifle Association working with ACLU and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition to produce a public policy report criticizing prosecutor excesses, which I wrote, that was released last month.

Blumenthal called me a "blogger" in the story, but didn't name the blog! Come on, Ralphie, where's the love? Otherwise, it's a good backgrounder on the issue.

Carl Isett's HB 1815 is the legislation that would fix the problem once and for all (I hope, at least - I thought we were done with it last session). That bill recently passed out of the Law Enforcement Committee 7-0 and is awaiting a vote on the House floor. See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Guns and traveling, once and for all
  
• Report: DAs defy Legislature over carrying handguns in personal vehicles
• Texas' new carry law, what does it mean?
• Volokh on guns and the ACLU in Texas
• Reflex
  
• Pack your pistola and hit the road
• Law allowing guns in vehicles protects rights
• Strange coalition backs consent search ban

UPDATE: Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum (who now lives in Texas, he declares) offered a post on Hit and Run about the Times story, and received quite a few comments (approaching 100 so far).

Annual racial profiling data analysis released

The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition today released this year's analysis of Texas' racial profiling data from traffic stops performed by Texas law enforcement agencies. The study focuses in particular on the relative frequency of "consent searches," not just by race but also disparities between different, often comparable agencies. I'll have more soon analyzing its contents, but for now here's a copy for the report (pdf) for those interested. (Congrats to Molly Totman, the report's author and the principal manager of TCJC's de facto statewide repository of racial profiling data.)

These data are for the calendar year 2005 and were reported to local governing bodies in spring 2006. Each year since the inception of the law, TCJC has gathered these reports under open records requests and compared traffic stop data across agencies in an annual analysis. Here's the press release TCJC issued today along with this year's study:

LAW ENFORCEMENT, THE PUBLIC, AND KEY STAKEHOLDERS NEED A MORE COMPREHENSIVE PICTURE OF WHAT IS HAPPENING AT TEXAS TRAFFIC STOPS

TCJC commends State Senator Royce West for filing bill to address continued problems with way agencies collect and report required racial profiling data, and Representative Senfronia Thompson for commitment to see bill through in House (Austin)

Law enforcement agencies continue to have problems complying with the data collection and reporting requirements of Texas’ racial profiling law, according to a report released today by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition (TCJC) titled Smarter Policing Practices: Creating a Safer, More Unified Texas. As a result, local community members and officials are prevented from knowing what is truly going on at traffic stops in their areas. Agencies are also unable to compare their data to other agencies’ data to determine if there are improvements to be made, or if there are practices they should be implementing to best allocate officer resources and increase public safety.

“Policy-makers must ensure that our state law enforcement agencies are providing value-driven police services throughout Texas,” said Ana Yáñez-Correa, Executive Director of TCJC. “But effective community policing models can only be implemented if a full range of uniform data is collected and reported by Texas agencies.”

The report offers major policy solutions – founded in statistical research and based on the feedback of both community members and law enforcement – that would address the problems facing law enforcement as they undergo mandated data collection and reporting processes. For instance, policy suggestions include the establishment of a statewide repository for racial profiling reports that could oversee data compliance issues; creation of a uniform, standardized reporting format that would help law enforcement agencies comply with Texas’ racial profiling law; and the required collection of three additional data elements at traffic stops to improve data accuracy and provide a clearer understanding of what is happening at stops.

TCJC, which is the current statewide repository and analyst of required, annual racial profiling reports from Texas law enforcement agencies, is also the only source of cross-agency monitoring. Researchers found that nearly 10% of surveyed agencies did not report all required data elements, while 20% did not break out all data elements by required racial categories.

“It is no longer excusable that some agencies continue to comply with the racial profiling law year in and year out, while others never do,” said Molly Totman, Policy Analyst for TCJC and author of the report. “Both agencies and the community benefit when data is sound, reliable, and uniformly reported. Most importantly, police supervisors are equipped to make informed and internal policy changes to improve the way they protect the public and better ensure a mutual relationship of confidence and community trust.”

To assist law enforcement in their efforts to comply with the racial profiling law, State Senator Royce West (D, Dallas) filed a bill in the Texas Legislature on March 8, 2007, that calls for a repository to be established at the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education (TCLEOSE), the Austin-based state agency responsible for developing and implementing training program curricula for peace officers. This bill will require agencies to submit their annual racial profiling reports to the statewide repository for analysis. Representative Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston) will carry the legislation forward in the House of Representatives when the bill passes out of the Senate.

“We commend both Senator West and Representative Thompson for their efforts to strengthen the existing racial profiling law by ensuring all Texas law enforcement agencies provide us with a full picture of what is happening at traffic stops and have the tools to put in place policies that will increase public safety,” said Totman.
Please go to our website for a full explanation of the report’s recommendations, as well as a city-specific fact sheets for the following areas:

Abilene
Amarillo
Austin
Beaumont/Port Arthur
Bryan/College Station
Corpus Christi
Dallas/Fort Worth
El Paso
Houston
Laredo
Lubbock
McAllen/Pharr/Edinburg
Midland/Odessa
San Angelo
San Antonio
Texarkana
Tyler/Longview/Lufkin/Nacogdoches
Victoria
Waco/Temple/Belton/Killeen
Wichita Falls

For information on the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition’s work in support of fair, effective police practices that improve the safety of our communities, see our webpage on the topic.

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops
• Don't mind if I take a look, do ya?
• Police oversearching not all about race
  
• Austin drivers refuse searches when they know they can
• How often do drivers refuse consent searches?
• UNT Academics: Centralize, standardize racial profiling data
• Denton traffic supervisor stopped 86% Hispanics
• ACLU vs. police unions on interpreting racial profiling data
• Police don't want to improve racial profiling data
• Feds: Racial profiling occurs during searches