University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Rick Rosenfeld said the statistics for Ferguson don’t stand out from many other St. Louis County municipalities.

“I don’t think Ferguson would be at the top of many people’s lists for racial tension between police and the community,” he said.

Rosenfeld also noted that the attorney general’s data has some limitations, specifically that it doesn’t account for whether drivers live in the jurisdiction where they’re stopped. This means that an index could be skewed in an area with interstate highways, busy roads or shopping centers. Additionally, an officer may not know the race of a driver when making the decision to stop someone.

Rosenfeld said the rate at which drivers are searched is a more useful metric. While the data doesn’t prove the existence of racial profiling, the fact that Ferguson police were more likely to search a vehicle when the driver was black yet less likely to find contraband than when the driver was white could be more indicative of a problem, he said.

Last year, Ferguson police searched 12.1 percent of black drivers they stopped, compared to 6.9 percent for whites. Contraband was found 22 percent of the time when the driver was black and 34 percent when the driver was white.