Ferguson Civilian Review Board (FCRB)

Racial Profiling

One of the responsibilities of the Ferguson Civilian Review Board, per ordinance, is to “…review racial profiling data…to identify patterns  and trends.”

To do this, Ferguson Police Department traffic stop data is displayed on various graphs that make patterns and trends easy to see.

Law enforcement agencies in the state of Missouri, including the Ferguson Police Department (FPD), provide vehicle stop data to the Missouri Attorney General’s office each year. This data must be provided to the Attorney General by March 1 and the Attorney General must compile and publish the data by June 

Information about the reporting process and all Missouri Vehicle Stops Reports from the year 2000 through last year are available at Missouri Vehicle Stops Report.

  1. Racial Disparity
  2. Vehicle Stops By Race

The following two charts visually summarize the disparity index for the FPD for the last 20+ years and make any patterns or trends easy to see.

According to the Attorney General’s report “...the ‘disparity index’... relates each racial/ethnic group’s proportion of total traffic stops to its proportion of the driving-age (16+) population. A value of 1 indicates that a group’s proportion of vehicle stops equals its population proportion: it is neither ‘under-represented’ nor ‘over-represented.’ Values above 1 indicate over-representation, and those below 1 indicate under-representation in traffic stops.” 

racial profiling

racial profiling 2