Columbia city leaders to hold meeting on racial disparity in traffic stops

The ongoing conversation over racial disparities in traffic stops will once more come to City Hall on Thursday night.

The Columbia City Council will host a work session at 6 p.m. over the Missouri Attorney General’s Office vehicle stops report. The report shows, among many things, that black drivers in Columbia are pulled over more than three times the expected rate when compared to white drivers.

Residents have hounded city leaders to address the issue for several years. Police chief Ken Burton said he does not believe his officers racially profile, but included more implicit bias training for officers.

The city will unveil a draft Thursday of its revised policy for bias-free policing. The policy would change how the department handles complaints of biased policing and what happens to officers found stopping drivers solely because of their race. Supervisors who receive a complaint of racial bias will refer it to the Internal Affairs Unit.

Officers that “have engaged in race-based traffic stops shall receive appropriate counseling and training within 90 days of that review,” according to the draft policy.

Some, though, have questioned the existence of racial profiling. Jeffrey Milyo, an economics professor at the University of Missouri, said his research showed no instances of racial profiling in the 2016-17 data provided by the attorney general. He said the report can often be misleading when people conflate racial disparities in traffic stops with racial profiling.

“I think there has been some acrimony and talking past each other, and part of that is people looking at ambiguous data with different prior beliefs about what they are going to see in this data,” Milyo said.