Five years after legislation began mandating police submit data on the race of who they’re stopping, advocates have made that information accessible to the public. But they are fighting to make the collection of race data broader and of better quality.
The new database from the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance compiles more than 700,000 traffic stops between 2010 and 2018, showing that black and Hispanic drivers in Vermont are more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers are. The database allows the public to see individual departments’ breakdown by race and whether the stop led to an arrest or ticket.
“Five years into the exercise, this data has never been consolidated into a rollup, a snapshot,” said Mark Hughes, executive director of Justice for All, the anchor organization of the alliance.
In a meeting in Burlington Tuesday, members of the Racial Justice Alliance discussed the long battle to get police departments to share this information. A 2014 law mandated police departments send data to the state, yet agencies have lagged behind, with only a handful providing it for 2018, said Patrick Autilio, who developed the database.
Several people at the meeting also criticized the way police reported the race of those they stopped, relying on their own impression of people’s race and lumping diverse categories — such as Middle Eastern and mixed-race people — into broad groups.
Stephanie Seguino, a University of Vermont economics professor, found statewide disparities in a 2017 study. She said there were several issues with the data, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for not addressing the problems it shows.
“The stories continue to be rampant. But if people tell anecdotes, there’s always a tendency to dismiss them as a special case,” she said.
Rep. Selene Colburn, P-Burlington, hopes to expand this model to the rest of the criminal justice system. She and seven other representatives have sponsored H.284, which would require the Departments of Judiciary, Corrections and State’s Attorneys to collect data on their outcomes by race.
“What Stephanie [Seguino] said about the lack of data being an excuse … that’s something we hear all the time,” Colburn said. “Different players come in and say ‘we don’t know what’s happening here.’”
When her committee tried to get data from the Department of Corrections, it would only provide a point-in-time count, she said. She said a study by the Justice Reinvestment Working Group, a state-appointed review board, has also been delayed because of poor or nonexistent data.
Another target for improvement, she said, is the way Vermont tracks sentences and plea bargains by race.
Colburn doesn’t know yet if the state will appropriate some spending to help with those improvements. “I don’t think those conversations are happening,” she said. “I hope that if we can get testimony on this bill, we will start that.”
Attorney General TJ Donovan supports the bill conceptually, said Charity Chark, Donovan’s chief of staff.
Chief Peter Mantello of the Castleton Police Department said adding another step in the data collection could prove “challenging” to the small police department.
The department uses a part-time officer to do administrative tasks like adding traffic stop data to the state database once a month. “But if they mandate it, we have to do it,” he said.
He said Castleton requires officers to file use-of-force reports, but they don’t currently log them into a spreadsheet. “It protects officers, protects towns, protects victims,” he said. “It’s not allowing any gray areas where there’s questions.”
Mantello urged communities to go talk to the police departments in their area. “I believe that communication and education starts at the local level,” he said.
Correction: This story originally identified the database as a project of Justice for All. In fact, it is an initiative of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, which includes Justice for All. This story also originally misidentified the Alliance as the Racial Justice Coalition.
