Rutland
The report, by University of Vermont professor Stephanie Seguino and visiting associate professor Nancy Brooks of Cornell University, is an update of their 2017 report.
Seguino and Brooks found that while black and Hispanic drivers were most likely to be searched after being stopped, they were significantly less likely to be found with contraband.
In their analysis of the Vermont State Police data, of the 440 searches, more than 70 percent of the contraband seized was marijuana, and 13 percent was heroin, cocaine or opioids.
In none of the searches, the report stated, were drivers of color found to be in possession of opioids.
“These findings indicate probable oversearching of black and Hispanic drivers compared to white drivers,” according to the report’s executive summary.
In a followup interview, Seguino, who is also a fellow at the UVM Gund Institute for the Environment, said while State Police and other law enforcement agencies were doing a better job collecting data, there was room for improvement.
State Police, for instance, didn’t share data on whether passengers in the vehicles had drugs. The 2014 state law that required Vermont law enforcement agencies to collect this data did not require the data on passengers, she said.
She said the more sophisticated analysis upheld the findings of their 2017 report.
Vermont State Police Lt. Garry Scott, head of the police’s Fair and Impartial Policing program, said the report, which he discussed with Seguino on Tuesday, didn’t contain any surprises for him.
He said while black and Hispanic drivers are searched at a higher rate, Vermont State Police only searched 22 drivers of color during stops in 2016.
And, he said, blacks and Hispanics face discrimination in other areas, not just in their interactions with law enforcement.
“This isn’t a police issue, it’s a societal issue,” he said.
He said the report had just been sent out on Wednesday afternoon to members of the Fair and Impartial Policing Committee, and it would likely be a few days before people had had a chance to digest and discuss it.
Curtiss Reed Jr., of Brattleboro, executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, who does implicit bias training for the State Police, could not be reached for comment about the report on Wednesday.
He is a member of the Fair and Impartial Policing Committee.
Scott said the VSP was committed to examining implicit bias in its ranks, from troopers to supervisors, and he said State Police had launched an ambitious training program to address the issue.
State Police were making a concentrated effort to recruit a more diverse group of troopers and were actively recruiting in historically black colleges in Philadelphia, Washington and Atlanta, he added.
Whether they will move to Vermont, he said, like others from other areas, remains to be seen.
“Diversity is important to us,” he said.