St. Paul police made more traffic stops, wrote more tickets and recorded the race of more drivers in 2017 than the previous year, according to data released Friday.

Police stopped almost 33,000 vehicles last year, nearly 20 percent more than in 2016.

Drivers stopped were much more likely to receive tickets than in years past. St. Paul police wrote 18,828 citations in 2017, a 137 percent increase over the year before and the most in more than a decade. A ticket was given in 58 percent of stops, up from 28 percent in 2016.

Police Chief Todd Axtell said officers issued more citations last year because traffic complaints are one of the top matters they hear about from community members.

“When we’re out in the community, at community events we always hear people saying, ‘We want more officers stopping speeding vehicles down our streets,’ ” Axtell said. “We made it a priority last year to do a couple things: slow drivers down for safety, which will have an impact on pedestrian and bicycle crashes, and we also made a commitment to increasing our distracted driving enforcement.”

Officers recorded the race of the driver in 94 percent of the stops, up from 84 percent the year before, resulting in a record low number of stops without racial data. The police department told officers they expect them to record their perception of a driver’s race, whenever possible, so they would have more complete information, Axtell said.

In December 2016, St. Paul police released traffic stop data for the first time and said they would begin doing so annually. Axtell said it’s part of the department’s ongoing commitment to transparency. Police had been collecting the information for 15 years at that point but had not previously analyzed it.

The initial 15 years of data showed St. Paul police officers routinely stopped, searched and ticketed black drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Last year’s data shows a slight improvement, but it is unclear if that is due to police being more likely to record a driver’s race.

Black drivers were involved in 33 percent of the police stops and make up 13 percent of the city’s driving-age residents. Drivers who were Asian, Hispanic and Native American did not see the same disparity. White drivers were involved in 43 percent of the police stops and make up 58 percent of the city’s population.

BLACK DRIVERS MORE LIKELY TO BE TICKETED

St. Paul officers receive annual training in implicit bias, which will continue, Axtell said. During officers’ evaluations, they each reviewed their individual traffic stop data “and had a conversation with their supervisor for awareness,” according to the police chief.

Did the police department expect disparities would lessen over the year?

“The only promise that I can make to our community and our officers is that we will have a heightened awareness of how we do our job and why we do our job,” Axtell said. “I firmly believe that our data is a symptom of a larger societal issue and until we solve disparities in health care, education, finance and housing, my fear is that this won’t change. … But we’ll never lose focus of providing equitable police services to our entire community. This is why community engagement, building trust and diversifying our department continues to be the highest priority.”

The new traffic stop data also showed black drivers were more likely to be ticketed than drivers of other races. Black drivers received 28 percent of the citations written by St. Paul police in 2017, while white drivers received about 50 percent of all tickets.

Dora Jones, founder and executive director of Mentoring Young Adults in St. Paul, said people in the African-American community worry about racial profiling in St. Paul and elsewhere.

Young and older people alike tell Jones that “every time they drive past the police or police get behind them, they go into a panic attack,” she said. “Their heart starts racing. They could be totally legit — insurance, license, everything — and they still have panic attacks.”

For the past eight years, before the start of summer, Jones has been organizing lunch gatherings with both young and older people to have lunch with St. Paul police officers. They discuss the curfew rules for teens, but the sole purpose is building connections between community members and officers, she said.

“We have open conversations with them about what they feel, what they fear, what they want to address,” Jones said.

WHERE MOST OF THE TRAFFIC STOPS HAPPENED

The traffic stop data released Friday also showed police were twice as likely to frisk black drivers and search their vehicles during a traffic stop. More than half the drivers who were frisked by police or had their vehicles searched in 2017 were black.

Axtell said officers make their decisions on facts that include a driver’s behavior and evidence that’s visible in a vehicle, but not race.

“As someone who doesn’t just sit in my corner office and who gets out there and talks with our community members, stops at traffic stops, and understands where the highest number of shots fired are occurring … I don’t believe for a second that our officers start their shift with the intent of stopping more African-American drivers than other races,” Axtell said.

Location also played a role in where police stopped drivers. St. Paul police slice the city up into roughly 200 grids of similar size.

The city’s least inhabited places had the fewest traffic stops, most notably the area around Battle Creek Regional Park.

Just two of those grids — part of downtown and a northern section of the city along Interstate 35E — were the site of more than 2,500 police stops, about 8 percent of the 32,733 police made in 2017. That could be because officers are responding to complaints about people speeding as they get off I-35E in the Maryland Avenue area and down the Kellogg-Third Street bridge, Axtell said. Related Articles St. Paul PD highlights surveillance photos of looting suspects, seeks tips

As memories of George Floyd fade, activists make sure his legacy does not

Minneapolis and St. Paul to add 70 electric car charging stations with $6.7M grant

Neighborhood girl finds and returns chef Justin Sutherland’s stolen knife roll

Therapy dog-in training stolen in St. Paul found, reunited with owners

Other high-volume areas included the Payne-Phalen and Frogtown neighborhoods. Last year, Axtell said he directed officers to patrol in the areas that were most impacted by gun violence — there was a significant increase in shots fired and 155 people wounded by gunfire, with the majority of the victims being African-American, according to police department data.

Officers’ patrols include investigative traffic stops, when they have reasonable suspicion to pull people over and they may be looking for suspects in gun cases, Axtell said.

Jones said she and other members of the African-American community also have concerns about gun violence.

“If there’s young little thugs in our community riding around with guns, I want their butts off the street,” Jones said. But she said she also wants police to find the right balance of “making sure they’ve got the right car and the people they’re looking for, instead of just pulling over random people.”

Click on a grid for more details.

For the first time, police revealed the reasons why they stopped drivers. The most common was for moving violations such as speeding, but officers also pulled vehicles over for equipment violations and in response to civilian complaints or for their own investigations.

The data also shows a disparity in the reasons drivers were stopped.

Black drivers were pulled over for equipment violations and for investigative reasons more often than any other racial or ethnic group. Black drivers accounted for more than 40 percent of police stops in those categories while making up 13 percent of the city’s residents of driving age.