NAACP lawsuit accuses Missouri AG of illegally withholding info on police vehicle stops
Attorney General Andrew Bailey speaks during a 2024 news conference in the Missouri House Lounge, flanked by House Speaker Dean Plocher, left, and state Rep. Justin Sparks (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications).
A new lawsuit filed by the Missouri NAACP accuses Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey of failing to follow state law last year when the annual vehicle stops report omitted data that shows whether minority motorists are being stopped more frequently than white drivers.
Filed Tuesday in Cole County, the lawsuit also accuses Bailey and the University of Missouri of violating the state Sunshine Law by withholding documents showing why the information called a disparity index was left out of the report on stops during 2023 and whether it was calculated at all.
The lawsuit was filed just days before the report for stops in 2024 is due on Sunday.
The disparity index is a ratio of stops among an identifiable group compared to their share of the population of driving age. If the ratio is one, it means that traffic stops in that particular group align with their share of the whole.
Bailey 'has an absolute, statutory and ministerial duty, pursuant to (state law), to include a 'disparity index,' that is a comparison of the percentage of stopped motor vehicles driven by each minority group and the percentage of the state's population that each minority group comprises, in his annual report,' the lawsuit states.
In the executive summary of the report issued June 1, 2024, the omission was explained as a decision to stop using a data point of questionable value and sometimes incorrect interpretation.
A disparity index of two for any minority group, the summary states, means very different things in a community where 10% of the population are members of that group compared to a community where 50% of the population are members of that group.
'The (vehicle stops report) already provides detailed information on traffic stops and rates relative to subgroup population, so no new objective information is provided by calculating the index,' the summary states.
But Rod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said questions about the usefulness of a data point are not enough to excuse ignoring the law that requires it.
'The requirements of the statute are clear, there shall be a disparity index that is produced by the attorney general,' he said. 'Last year, Attorney General Bailey recognized that, I think, in his summary, and chose not to do it.'
For the state as a whole, the report for 2023 shows, 538 police agencies made almost 1.4 million traffic stops, issued almost 570,000 citations and made 57,713 arrests. White motorists accounted for 77% of the stops, another 17.3% of the motorists were Black and 3.1% were Hispanic.
The Independent calculated a disparity index that showed the index for white drivers was 0.97 while the index for black drivers was 1.59. For Hispanic drivers, the disparity index was 0.8, indicating stops in smaller numbers than their portion of the population. Those figures are similar to what past reports showed.
In the lawsuit, the NAACP is asking for an order directing Bailey to publish the disparity index calculations for the state as a whole and for the 538 police agencies that submitted reports on their traffic stops. The lawsuit also asks for an order stating he has a statutory obligation to include it in future reports and to turn over records requested last year regarding the decision to omit the index.
The Sunshine Law violations alleged in the lawsuit state that the last communication from the attorney general's office regarding a Nov. 13 request for records was Feb. 26. Bailey's office said records would be ready in a week but has not delivered them, the lawsuit states.
The University of Missouri performed calculations presented in the report, and the NAACP sought records regarding those calculations and the decision not to include the index. On May 16, the university, after taking six months, delivered 443,000 documents. But it also said, according to the lawsuit, that 'many of the records identified in response to your search criteria have been withheld' under Sunshine Law provisions allowing records to be closed.
One of the exemptions cited is that the withheld records were related to legal actions or litigation or confidential or privileged communications with attorneys. In the court filing, the NAACP says that claim is a ruse because, other than the lawsuit filed Tuesday, the University of Missouri is 'not involved in legal actions, causes of action or litigation involving the requested documents.'
Bailey's office said it would not comment on the lawsuit.
University of Missouri spokesman Christopher Ave, in an email, said 'we deny liability for the violation alleged in this case and plan to present our defenses in court.'
The vehicle stops report has been published since 2000 under a law intended to detect and prevent racial profiling of motorists. The data reported has been refined over the years, including the disparity index.
The most recent version of the disparity index, before it was discontinued, was calculated based on total stops within a jurisdiction and for stops of motorists who reside within that jurisdiction.
That is an improvement in the data, Chapel said, because it shows whether minority visitors to tourist areas are being stopped in greater numbers than the resident population. The NAACP travel advisory for Missouri issued in 2017 used data from the vehicle stops reports to state that 'African Americans are 75 per cent more likely to be stopped and searched based on skin color than Caucasians.'
The allegation is supported by data on stops that result in discovery of contraband, Chapel said.
'If you look at most of the data, it says that black and brown people get stopped more than anybody else, but the rate at which they're found with contraband is lower,' Chapel said. 'So that would say that we are misusing community resources in a way that is not effective.'
In 2023, 25.5% of white drivers stopped had contraband, compared to 20.5% for Black drivers and 16.3% for Hispanic drivers. Black and Hispanic drivers were, however, much more likely to receive a citation after the stop, with 38.2% of white drivers stopped receiving a ticket, compared to 55.2% for Black drivers and 50.4% for Hispanic drivers.
Don Love of Columbia, who has been analyzing the annual vehicle stops reports for more than a decade, said that he dislikes the disparity index because it is an imprecise measure of officer motives for a stop.
He's argued for a new method to replace it.
'What they did wasn't replace it, but just to leave it out entirely,' Love said. 'It wasn't good, but it's illegal for them not to have it in there.'
The use of ratios to analyze the data should be expanded, he said, to cover other data in the report, including the number of drivers searched, the contraband found and the arrests made, as well as whether drivers get a citation or just a warning.
Breaking the stop data into resident and non-resident stops added a new dimension to the data, Love said.
'If you look at what happens for Black drivers when they leave their home jurisdictions and go someplace else, there's something more than two times the white rate,' he said.
Omitting the disparity index was not done without thought, Chapel said. The lawsuit is intended to discover the motive and prove that the law requires it as part of the report, he added.
'There's any number of things that the attorney general is supposed to do,' Chapel said, 'and if he's just making the decision not to do it, we deserve to know.'
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