Burlington police are stopping and searching fewer drivers on city streets, but continue to stop Black drivers at higher rates compared to the city’s white residents.
The department’s 2019 traffic stop data, released Thursday, shows 2,019 stops in 2019, down 26% from the previous year. During that period, officers wrote tickets during 357 of those stops, down 31% from 2018.
The department continues to stop Black drivers at a disproportionately high rate, with Black drivers representing 9.5% of all drivers stopped despite making up only just over 4% of the city’s population of residents over the age of 15.
Black drivers who are stopped are both ticketed and arrested at a higher rate than their percentage of the overall population. While 15.7% of Black drivers who were stopped received a ticket, only 11.5% of white drivers who were stopped received a ticket.
And while 2% of Black drivers who were stopped were arrested, only 0.5% of white drivers who were pulled over were arrested.
The overall decrease in stops continues the trend in recent years, as traffic stops have fallen drastically in the last three years. The recent peak was 6,141 stops in 2015, and stops have fallen 67% in the past five years.
The department has also drastically reduced searches in the past couple of years, with only seven searches conducted in 2019. The department conducted 127 searches in 2016, with 33 of those, or around a quarter, conducted on Black drivers, a significantly disproportionate amount.
In 2019, the department did not search a single Black driver.
The Burlington City Council voted to reduce the department’s staffing levels by 30% through attrition late last month, capping the department’s staffing at 74 officers. That vote followed weeks of calls from residents for the city to enact the demands of the Racial Justice Alliance, many of which were included in the council’s resolution.
A department report released late last year found that Burlington police used force on Black residents at a disproportionate rate, with Black residents being the subjects of police use of force in more than a fifth of use of force cases despite making up only around 6% of the city’s overall population.
In the press release announcing the traffic stop data, the department argued that the percentage of Black drivers in the city was higher than the percentage of Black residents. The department estimated that Black drivers make up 8.4% of drivers in the city based on the fact that 8.4% of drivers involved in crashes in the city are Black.
Acting Police Chief Jon Murad said in the release that the report reflected the department’s commitment to data transparency.
“Police exist to keep people safe, and traffic safety is a big part of that,” Murad said. “The men and women of the Burlington Police Department do an excellent job making sure that our roadways are safe — and they do so in a fair way, as well.”
The report showed that both crashes that did not involve injury and crashes with injury have risen only slightly, with crashes without injury up 1.7%. Crashes with injury were up 3.4% compared to the previous year, but remain below 2012 levels.
Stephanie Seguino, a professor of economics at the University of Vermont who has studied racial bias in Vermont police car searches, said it was encouraging the decrease in traffic stops has not had an effect on public safety.
“Public safety has not been significantly affected by this, suggesting that, in fact, we may be able to do with fewer policing resources, given the really significant decline in traffic stops,” she said.
Seguino said that she and colleagues were working on a more detailed study of race in traffic stops. She said it was difficult to draw conclusions on a single year’s worth of data.
The decrease in search rates is possibly linked to the legalization of marijuana in the state in July 2018, she said. Research from Colorado showed that police searches of vehicles there dropped significantly following the legalization of marijuana there.
Erin Petenko contributed reporting.
