Statesman Investigates: Racial profiling claims in Texas traffic stops

While data could allow state troopers to identify problem search behaviors early, videos show past investigations raise as many questions

Published September 9, 2016

Amid national uproar over a state trooper’s treatment of Sandra Bland during a traffic stop in July 2015, the American-Statesman embarked on a comprehensive analysis of traffic stop and search data.

In December, the Statesman found that African-American and Hispanic motorists were searched more often when stopped, and contraband found less often for Hispanic drivers than white drivers.

Earlier this year, DPS Director Steve McCraw testified before state lawmakers that troopers do not engage in racial profiling and encouraged the public to instead look at the individual cases in which officers are accused of racial profiling. There have been about 40 in the last five years, and the Statesman requested the dashcam videos from those incidents through a request under the Texas Public Information Act.

While DPS said they haven't found evidence to support any allegations of racial profiling, some of the videos raise more questions about how the department handles those investigations than they answer about racial bias in policing. Highlights of them are below, along with Sean Collins Walsh's report.

In addition to the videos, the Statesman looked again at stop data since 2009 to study how frequently individual troopers searched motorists, and how those search rates differ by race. Reporting and analysis of 14 million traffic stop records by Eric Dexheimer, Jeremy Schwartz and Christian McDonald found that 35 percent of officers studied searched minority motorists at more than twice the rate of white motorists, and most found contraband less often as a result of those searches.