Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Police Data And Transparency topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Tomball council authorizes posting of police contact data under state law after department report
Summary
The City Council voted to authorize posting of the Tomball Police Department's annual contact data report, required by Senate Bill 1074. Chief Burt presented stop/search statistics and directed further review after the data showed Black drivers were searched at a higher rate than their share of stops.
The Tomball City Council on Feb. 3 authorized the posting of the Tomball Police Department’s annual contact-data report, as required by Texas Senate Bill 1074. Police Chief Burt presented the department’s collected motor-vehicle stop data and described steps the department will take to review areas of disproportionate searches.
Chief Burt told the council that state law requiring this report (Senate Bill 1074) prohibits racial profiling and requires agencies to collect seven elements for motor-vehicle contacts that result in a warning, citation, arrest or use of force. He said the department stopped 13,167 individuals last year and that officers reported knowing a driver’s race or ethnicity prior to the stop in fewer than 1% of cases.
The nut graf: the data show most stops involved white drivers but an elevated share of searches of Black drivers, prompting a directed review. Chief Burt reported that 59% of stops were of white drivers, 22% were of Hispanic drivers and 14.67% were of Black drivers. Searches occurred in about 4% of stops (543 searches). Of those searches, 57% were reported as based on probable cause, roughly one-third were consent searches, and officers located contraband in 308 searches. The chief highlighted one disparity: Black drivers made up about 14.7% of stops but accounted for 28% of searches.
"That was something I wanted to study a little deeper," Chief Burt said, describing a judgmental sample he directed Captain Sean Davis to perform of stops in which officers searched Black drivers. The sample he described showed drugs were recovered in the sampled searches; in the chief’s words, in seven of eight sampled incidents the driver admitted to possessing marijuana and drugs were found in all eight sampled vehicles.
Burt told the council the department will continue to audit stops and body-worn video, and said the agency follows Texas Police Chiefs Association best practices and conducts monthly audits and judgmental samples when issues appear. He said the department would continue to focus on “fair and constitutional stops.”
Council then voted to authorize posting the report to comply with the statute. The motion to authorize posting carried unanimously.
Ending: The council’s authorization triggers the city’s public posting requirement under SB 1074; Chief Burt said the department will pursue additional internal reviews of the patterns the report flagged and return with any findings tied to supervisory audits.
