Traffic stop data debated
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on December 27, 2015 3:05 AM
According to data recently released from opendatapolicingnc.com, minorities in Goldsboro are far more likely to be searched by authorities than whites are after being stopped for vehicle equipment violations -- more than 1,700 percent more likely.
City Manager Scott Stevens recently addressed that percentage during his city manager's report at Monday night's City Council meeting, saying the data from the opendatapolicingnc.com site does not match the information the city itself has on hand.
Data taken from the website analyzes vehicle equipment violation stops for 2015, while Stevens said the city was basing its numbers off of data it had collected from 2014.
Opendatapolicingnc.com analyzes data from traffic stops looking at race, ethnicity and what violation occurred to cause the traffic stop. Numbers reported by the data on the site show that black and non-white people are consistently more likely than whites to be searched after being stopped in Goldsboro.
The site was launched by the nonprofit civil rights organization Southern Coalition for Social Justice a week ago, and was launched with support from the White House itself.
The site aggregates and presents data from nearly 20 million traffic stops made by every police officer in North Carolina since Jan. 1, 2002, including officers in Goldsboro.
"I'll tell you, and this is outside the report, the data I have from 2014 that talks about equipment (violation) vehicle stops, we stopped 184 non-white (for equipment violations), or 57 percent, and 137 white (for equipment violations), or 43 percent," Stevens said.
Stevens said the number of white people versus non-white and black people stopped for vehicle equipment violations nearly matches Goldsboro's racial makeup, which is 61 percent black.
He said according to data the city had from 2014, the Goldsboro police Department pulled over 5,292 vehicles -- or, between 14 and 15 vehicles per day on average.
"Fifty percent of those were black (or non-white), 44 percent were white," Stevens said. "Our census data shows we are 61 percent black or other, and 39 percent white. So that data doesn't look like there's a problem with the initial traffic stop. The numbers don't seem to make sense to me as I look at the number of what they referred to as vehicle equipment violations. We haven't pulled over a significant number of people and then gone from that, but again, we'll be searching in (to it) and looking what the response is. The data, I assume, is what the data is. We need to find out the reason behind it or was something misinterpreted."
But District 4 council member Bevan Foster said, after seeing the numbers reported by opendatapolicingnc.com, he believed that the numbers were not referring to the number of stops themselves, but rather the number of stops that resulted in searches that were unfairly weighted towards minorities in Goldsboro.
"I think they're stating stop and search, and you're stating stop," Foster said.