The citizens of Ferguson had a problem with "Driving (or Walking) While Black" long before the killing of an unarmed black teenager by police officers catapulted its racial tensions to the national stage.

Michael Brown's killing at the hands of a still unnamed police officer wasn't the only potential civil rights violation of the mostly while police force against the mostly black town population, data show.

The Missouri Attorney General's Office has compiled statistics for police forces and racial profiling since 2000 and Ferguson has consistently scored poorly. With no solution, the potential for problems has only escalated in the past decade as the town has become more black. The now majority black town only has a handful of black officers on the police force, furthering tensions.



According to the attorney general's numbers, blacks are stopped by police way more often than their fellow white citizens.

These numbers become even more staggering after controlling for population. While whites and Hispanics are stopped less than we would expect given their share of the population, blacks are stopped by police far more.

And the numbers aren't just unequal for police stops. Blacks are also searched and arrested more often after being stopped than their white counterparts, even though the data show whites are more likely to be caught with contraband if searched. This is likely because police have a higher threshold for stopping whites. So, while a black citizen can be stopped for "Driving While Black," a white person is stopped for actual suspicious activity. Thus, a white stop and the resulting search is more likely to turn up contraband.

Given the changing town makeup and the attorney general's attention to racial profiling, one would think lowering rates of racial profiling would be a priority for the Ferguson Police Department. The data show otherwise. While the general trend (indicated by the dotted line) is downward, rates for searches, arrests and disparities in stops are still disproportionately racially biased in Ferguson, and haven't seen much improvement in the last decade.