Black motorists still are more likely to be stopped than drivers of other groups, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster reported Friday.
Where a "1.0" value represents stops in proportion to a group's share of Missouri's total population, the statewide black disparity index was 1.57, Koster said in the 13th annual "Vehicle Stops" report, created by the Legislature to track whether law officers were "picking" on one group more than others.
But, the attorney general reported, the black number was lower in 2012 than in 2011, when the rate was 1.63 - representing the third time in 13 years that the disparity index for black drivers had decreased.
The statewide report is based on information provided to the attorney general's office by 616 separate law enforcement agencies.
This year's report analyzed more than 1.6 million total traffic stops around the state.
As a statewide agency, the Missouri Highway Patrol has a high volume of traffic stops - 392,412 in 2012.
Of those, 345,360 (88 percent) were white drivers, while 34,666 were black drivers (8.83 percent).
The Patrol stopped 6,834 Hispanic drivers last year (1.77 percent of the total stops).
But the disparity ratios for the patrol's stops were substantially lower than the statewide numbers.
For whites, the patrol's number was 1.06 (statewide, 0.96).
For blacks, the patrol's disparity number was 0.81 (statewide, 1.57).
And for Hispanics, the patrol's number was 0.59 - virtually the same as the statewide number, 0.60, which itself was down from last year's 0.65.
In his news release announcing the 2012 report, Koster cautioned that the disparity index for any community is not conclusive evidence of racial profiling.
"One of the best uses of these reports is as a springboard for dialogue and communication between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve," Koster said. "It is vital that Missouri law enforcement agencies continue to review the rates of stops and searches and to continue their outreach efforts."
Lt. John Hotz, a patrol spokesman, told the News Tribune: "The Missouri State Highway Patrol takes this issue very seriously.
"Our first line supervisors (zone sergeants) continually monitor the traffic stops of their subordinates (and) we continue to include biased based profiling issues training to each enforcement officer on the Patrol as part of our yearly required training."
The report doesn't stop at traffic stops - it also details the rate the officers searched a vehicle after a stop was made.
In that category, 104,000 vehicles were searched in 2012, with contraband (like illegal drugs) found in nearly 26 percent of those searches.
The patrol's search rate for vehicles driven by whites was 3.97 percent (statewide, 5.55 percent), while the patrol had the same rate - 7.13 percent - for both blacks (statewide, 10.15 percent) and Hispanics (statewide, 10.63 percent).
However, whites had the highest "contraband hit rate" statewide following those searches - 25.54 percent, compared with 18.75 percent for blacks and 16.92 percent for Hispanics.
State law requires the attorney general to submit the annual report to the governor no later than June 1.
So the Missouri Association for Social Welfare offered some thoughts about the report even before it was released.
"The Vehicle Stops Report (VSR) is an invaluable data set related to a significant aspect of police work," the association said in its three-page release. "The overall 2011 statewide data documented that "driving while black' is a problem in Missouri, not just an urban myth."
The MASW release also said the annual vehicle stops report has some built-in flaws.
"The proportions of minorities in a jurisdiction are not dependable indicators of the proportions of minorities who are driving in the jurisdiction," the MASW release said. "More sophisticated statistical analysis could correct this discrepancy, which makes the Disparity Index unreliable in jurisdictions which have an influx of drivers whose racial designation does not match that of the residents."
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