A new traffic stop study from the University of Vermont that analyzed six years of data found that racial profiling of Black people has continued unabated, despite marijuana legalization and years of attempts at police reform.
Stephanie Seguino, a professor at the University of Vermont, led a 2017 study that was the first to reveal widespread racial disparities in traffic stops in Vermont. In 2014, the state began requiring police departments to release data on the outcomes of traffic stops and the race of people they’d pulled over.
Seguino’s latest study, in partnership with Cornell professor Nancy Brooks and data analyst Pat Autilio, has data up to 2019, the first full year that marijuana possession was legal in Vermont.
The research shows that, while the number of searches police conducted during traffic stops declined post-legalization, the disparity between Black and white drivers increased.
Black drivers were more likely to be stopped, searched or arrested than white Vermonters in 2019 — even though searches of Black drivers had a lower “hit rate” of finding contraband.
Lingering disparities have been found in other states that have legalized marijuana, too. In Colorado and Washington, the percentage of drivers searched during traffic stops declined, but “the racial disparities in searches remain,” according to an analysis by the Stanford Policing Project.
Seguino said the data suggests that Black drivers are more likely to be subject to discretionary searches, or “reasonable suspicion” searches, which have a lower threshold of evidence than “probable cause” searches.
“When there’s little evidence, officers project their own implicit biases onto the situation,” Seguino said.
Police reform activists have advocated for more rules and less discretion for police stops. They want to eliminate so-called “pretextual” stops based only on an officer’s suspicion of wrongdoing.
Vermont has a much higher traffic stop rate than the rest of the country, the data shows: About 255 drivers are stopped per 1,000 residents, compared to a national average of 86 per 1,000.
Vermont also has a lower crime rate compared with the rest of the nation, according to the FBI. Brooks said the high stop rate does not seem to match Vermont’s needs.
“Why would you have this much difference if all police officers are trained to maintain a similar level of public safety?” Brooks said.
Lia Ernst, senior staff attorney for the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the study’s findings are not surprising in view of previous traffic-stop studies.
“As in past reports, we continue to see that after a stop that Black and brown drivers are much more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband,” Ernst said. “To me, this is one of the most telling findings of the report.”
Between Vermont’s high stop rate and the racial disparities, almost half of Black drivers were stopped during the time period the researchers studied — 459 drivers for every 1,000 Black residents, compared to 256 stops per 1,000 white residents.
Mia Schultz, president of the Rutland Area NAACP, said the study’s findings support what Black people are experiencing in Vermont.
“We already know; we live it,” she said of the racial disparities revealed in the report. “It’s what we’ve been saying for a long time.”
“We’ve been screaming it from the rooftops.”
In communities covered by the Rutland Area NAACP, which includes Addison, Bennington and Rutland counties, she said it has been difficult, and in some cases impossible, to get local leaders to acknowledge that the disparities exist.
“First of all, we need acknowledgement and then removal of people who can’t look at the data and see past their own lens to see how this is affecting the most marginalized and vulnerable people,” she said. “You’ll continue to see these statistics as long as those people are in power.”
The department data
While Seguino’s team has tried to look at department-level trends since the data was first collected, they’ve often been hampered by poor-quality data and missing information.
“There was no accountability at the state level until recently,” Seguino. “So that meant if agencies didn’t turn in their data, there were no consequences. If data was incomplete, no consequences.”
Those issues continued into 2019, with many departments reporting so many drivers of “unknown” race that it’s difficult to say how many drivers of color they stopped. In Windsor, for example, 73% of drivers were recorded as “unknown” race.
But even among departments with a full set of data on race, there were “no obvious patterns,” Brooks said.
“In Chittenden County, where there’s a lot of different agencies, you could have some of the ones that had some of the worst disparities, and some of the ones that had the lowest disparities within the same area,” she said.
Autilio said the differing rates could point to cultural factors within a department that change outcomes.
Looking for context
Police chiefs say they still need more information before drawing conclusions from the data.
Montpelier Police Chief Brian Peete — who became Vermont’s first Black police chief when he was hired this summer — said that, while he was aware of the study, he hasn’t done a “deep dive” into the numbers.
Among the report’s findings for Montpelier, white drivers in traffic stops were issued warnings 84.2% of the time, while Black drivers received warnings 81% of the time. Also, according to the study, Black drivers received tickets in 23% of stops, compared to 16.7% for white drivers.
“I didn’t see where officers or departments were allowed to provide input into the numbers that they have,” Peete said of the study. “Sometimes it’s not just enough to say this group or this person was pulled over this ‘X’ amount of times; to me it’s the context that we need to be looking at.”
In Brandon, the study findings showed that over the five-year period white drivers were searched at a rate of 1.6%, for a total of 57 searches. For Black drivers, the search rate was much higher 6.1%, for a total of 3 searches.
“I think the numbers are too low to make any connections,” Brandon Police Chief Christopher Brickell said of the disparity in the search rates.
Schultz, president of the Rutland area NAACP, said training is a start, but she believes a cultural shift, involving a redesign of policing, is necessary.
“There needs to be a more holistic approach,” she said.