The story began with a Texas law that went into effect in January 2002 and required every law enforcement agency in the state to track the race of drivers stopped and searched. Seeking to go beyond this debate, the San Antonio Express-News filed a state open records request and obtained the first full year's worth of data for the city. Using Microsoft Access I analyzed nearly 290,000 records detailing all the police traffic and pedestrian stops for 2002.
This was my first computer-assisted reporting story, done shortly after I attended a NICAR Boot Camp in March. Before we could put the findings into perspective we had to leap one of our biggest hurdles: finding a point of comparison. Profiling experts agree that no convenient standard exists for comparing data. Census figures reflect a community's population, not the demographics of drivers. In the end, we settled on using Census data for San Antonio residents but told readers up front about the debate over comparing the numbers and emphasized that our benchmark was imperfect.
We determined the stop rates by summing the total number of drivers stopped for traffic reasons for each race and calculated that as a percent of the total number of drivers stopped. Then we compared those percentages to the Census population percentages. To determine the search rates we compared the total number of drivers of each race who were searched to the total number of drivers of each race stopped for traffic reasons.
Among the findings: Police stop minorities and whites for traffic reasons at rates that are roughly proportional to their share of the population. But during probable cause and consensual searches – instances in which officers use discretion – blacks are more than three times as likely as whites to face a search during traffic and pedestrian stops. Although blacks are more likely to face consensual searches, police found contraband — some type of evidence of a crime, stolen property or drugs — at about the same rates for all three groups.
With those findings in hand it was time for the traditional reporting. I interviewed police officers and administrators, civil rights advocates, profiling experts and drivers. I pulled the ticket numbers from the data and submitted an open records request to the San Antonio Municipal Court for copies of about 40 traffic tickets. In response to the article, San Antonio police acknowledged that the difference between the search rates of whites and blacks caught their attention.
Contact Karisa King by e-mail at kking@express-news.net.