WACO, TX — The informal Racial Profiling Report for Waco Police Department has been released.
In 2002, the State of Texas mandated that law enforcement agencies adopt a detailed written policy on racial profiling, and collect certain data on citations, searches and arrests resulting from traffic stops by Texas Racial Profiling Law.
The report is due on March 1st of every year.
In September 2017, the State of Texas passed Senate Bill 1849, known as the Sandra Bland Act, which required police departments to document all traffic stops, including verbal warnings.
The bill comes after Sandra Bland, a black woman, was found dead in a Waller County jail cell in 2015 after a traffic stop.
The 2019 traffic contact data collected reveals that of 14,060 traffic stops, 45% of individuals issued citations were Caucasians, 25% were African Americans, 29% were Hispanic, 0.7% were Asian, 0.02% were Native Americans and 0.28% were categorized as Other. The officers did not have prior knowledge of the racial ethnicity of the individual in 13,742 of the total traffic stops. There was one alleged racial profiling complaint filed with the department in 2019, but the investigation resulted in an "unfounded" finding.
Specifically, the data showed 3,560 African Americans, 116 Asian/Pacific Islanders, 6,237 Caucasians, 4,107 Hispanic/Latinos were issued citations.
When asked whether race or ethnicity was known prior to a stop, the results showed 318 for "Yes" and 13,742 for "No."
The Waco Police Department says physical force resulting in bodily injury was used 1 time during a stop.
Women were stopped 6,402 times and men were stopped 7,658 times.
Moving traffic violations accounted for 11,222 citations. 137 stops were for violations of law.
Contraband was discovered during 308 stops, and 215 of those were drugs.
The report says the findings presented in the attached report is a method they use to monitor our traffic contacts, to insure compliance with department policy and state law prohibiting racial profiling. "Our overall percentage of citations remains about the same in the past two years."
Click here to see the report.
