Study Reveals Racial Disparities In Virginia Drivers Stopped By Police

VIRGINIA — Although Black residents represent only 19.5 percent of Virginia’s driving-age population, 30.8 percent of drivers stopped by police over a nine-month period ending in March 2022, were Black, according to a new study.

Black drivers who were stopped in Virginia were also searched at higher rates than white drivers who were stopped. According to the study, 2.8 percent of stopped Black drivers were searched by police, while 2.1 percent of white drivers were searched.

“Sadly, the data shows what Black Virginians have known all along,” Da’Quan Marcell Love, the executive director of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, told the Virginia Mercury about the first year of traffic stop data analyzed. "We’ve been saying this for years."

In its “Report on the Analysis of Traffic Stop Data Collected under Virginia’s Community Policing Act,” researchers at the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services looked at data provided by police agencies in the state. As a state agency, the mission of the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services is to work to improve the criminal justice system across the state through trainings, partnerships and research.

Virginia launched the mandatory data collection in July 2020, under the Community Policing Act of 2020, requiring police across the state to begin documenting demographic data about who they stop and for what reasons. The records also detail whether a search was initiated and any enforcement action taken.

Released on Oct. 5, the new report examined the racial and ethnic makeup of drivers involved in 567,181 traffic stops in Virginia during the nine-month period between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022.

"The overall finding of this analysis is that, statewide, Black and Hispanic drivers in Virginia were disproportionately stopped by law enforcement when compared to other drivers, based on the number of drivers stopped relative to their numbers in Virginia’s population," the report's authors said. "Stops of Black and Hispanic drivers were also more likely to result in a search or an arrest. This finding is consistent with traffic stop research conducted in other states."

However, the report's authors emphasized that the data does not allow them to determine the extent to which these disparities "may be due to bias-based profiling or other factors that can vary depending on race or ethnicity."

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For the report, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services examined traffic stop data from the Virginia State Police and from 304 local police departments and sheriff offices. The degree to which each agency’s data could be analyzed depended on both the amount of data reported by the agency and the amount of resident population data available for the locality served by the agency, the report's authors said.

The Virginia State Police has been actively engaged with the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services with providing traffic stop data for the legally required report.

"The state police has strict policies that prohibit bias-based policing," the Virginia State Police said in a statement emailed to Patch. "State police traffic stops are the result of observed violations of the law with the goal of promoting highway safety and combating crime on primary, secondary and interstate highways across the Commonwealth."

The state police also said it routinely reviews all data collected for the purpose of identifying any trends or patterns that would be of concern or necessitate policy changes.

The Fairfax County Police Department said it supports analytic reviews of all incidents and encourages deeper dives into understanding the circumstances of police contacts with community members.

"We have a longstanding policy against bias-based policing, which was recently updated under General Order 2," the FCPD said in a statement emailed to Patch. "All members of FCPD have either completed or in the process of completing Implicit Bias and Procedural Justice training, which supplements training our police officers receive as recruits at the Criminal Justice Academy."

Reasons For Traffic Stops

The vast majority — 97.6 percent, or 553,654 — of the traffic stops for the latest reporting period were made for traffic or motor-vehicle equipment violations. Only 2.4 percent, 13,390, of the traffic stops resulted in a search of the driver or the vehicle. This is lower than the previous year’s rate of 3.8 percent for searches of driver, vehicle, or passenger, according to the report.

Hispanic drivers of any race were also stopped at higher rates than white drivers from July 2021 through March 2022, although not to the same extent as Black drivers. Although Hispanic drivers made up 8.9 percent of Virginia’s driving-age population in the dataset, they made up 9.5 percent of drivers stopped, according to the report.

Black drivers who were stopped were also arrested at higher rates than white drivers. The study found that 1.9 percent of Black drivers stopped were arrested, compared to 1.2 percent of white drivers during the most recent reporting period.

A year after the passage of the Community Policing Act of 2020, the Virginia General Assembly also passed legislation prohibiting the kind of low-level traffic stops that experts contend disproportionately affect people of color and are often used as pretexts to search for drugs and weapons.

Up until July 1, 2021, police officers in Virginia routinely used “equipment violations” to justify traffic stops for investigation purposes, according to defense attorneys. But with the new legislation, the Virginia General Assembly restricted a police officer’s authority to pull a driver over for an equipment violation alone.

“As public defenders, we aren’t exactly used to winning, let alone winning big,” Brad Haywood, the chief public defender for Arlington County and executive director of Justice Forward, a criminal justice reform organization made up of public defenders across the state, told NBC News about the restrictions on low-level stops. “This will dramatically reduce race-based policing and impact so many lives.”

In its report on traffic stop data, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services recommended that it should continue to research additional sources of information and analytic approaches to determine whether any disparities between different racial and ethnic groups in traffic stops are due to bias-based policing or if they are due to other factors that could lead to disproportionate numbers of stops for minority drivers.

Also, the department suggested that it should attempt to examine whether there are differences in the proportion of successful legal challenges made to traffic stops, searches and arrests for minority and non-minority drivers.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services further recommended that the General Assembly consider amending the Community Policing Act legislation to change the report deadline to Nov. 1.

Because this report is due to the General Assembly on July 1 of each year under the state law, the date range of Community Policing Act data used for analysis cannot span the full fiscal year at hand. With an additional three months to process and analyze more recent data, the report could cover the full twelve months of each preceding fiscal year, including any seasonal trends from April through June currently missing from the report’s data, the department said.

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