A black Milwaukee driver is seven times as likely to be stopped by police officers as a white motorist, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday.
The newspaper based that on an analysis of nearly 46,000 traffic stops that also found Milwaukee police pulled over Hispanic motorists nearly five times as often as white drivers.
It also found that police searched black drivers at twice the rate of whites, but those searches didn’t lead to higher rates of seized weapons, drugs or stolen property.
While the review found that the disparities spanned all seven police districts, the two with the greatest racial disparities, Districts 1 and 6, have the lowest crime rates, and both have predominantly white populations.
The newspaper said the disparities it found in Milwaukee are greater than other large metro police departments where traffic stop data is collected, including Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina, and Kansas City and St. Louis in Missouri.
The Journal Sentinel’s review was based on data from a since-repealed state law that required law enforcement agencies to collect detailed information on every traffic stop.
State Rep. Tamara Grigsby, D-Milwaukee, who helped draft the traffic data provision, said the newspaper’s findings confirm her belief that minority drivers are treated unfairly.
“Is racial profiling real?” Grigsby said. “It’s like water to a fish in my world. There is a feeling, there is an understanding, an unsaid knowledge that this is part of the experience of being a person of color in Wisconsin. It feels like a standard practice in this state.”
Read the full article here.
