Driving While Black: UNCG Police Department Search Statistics Paint a Picture

An important part of UNCG putting its house in order is a full and thorough investigation of the people and practices in the UNCG police department.

Here’s a good place to start – an anecdote that led to looking at some data.

When UNCG opened the tunnel leading under the train tracks, there were a small number of protesters. It was anticipated that there would be a great number more or at least, that’s what the police presence indicated. On the side of the tunnel where the Chancellor was to give her opening remarks, there were at least six uniformed police officers. Their radios could be heard with the crackling commentary of police, some undercover, stationed at a variety of other locations and tracking the movement of a certain number of individuals.

On the other side of the tunnel, one of those individuals wanted to hang a home made banner reading “UNCGentrification” but his efforts were met with the full force of the UNCG police department. Officers, some with guns drawn, forced the student to the ground and pushed his face into the concrete before handcuffing him.

This student is black.

Given the use of statistics to examine police department’s attitudes towards race as reflected in their actions, I turned to the website for the North Carolina Department of Justice to see how UNCG’s finest are showing their colors.

Let me preface the numbers with this:

Greensboro’s population in 2010 according to census data was 32.95% Black or African-American. UNCG’s student body has an ethnic minority enrollment of 43% with the total percentage of the student body made up of Black or African-American students being 25.2%.

Let’s acknowledge that this information can never be completely accurate, that there are people who don’t fill out the racial information, or who self-identify differently than they might be identified by others, etc.

Now, then, the question is this:

Why did the UNCG police search 652 black drivers from 2009 – 2014 while only finding 490 white drivers that required their attention?

Or, we could ask why it is that, given the racial composition of UNCG and Greensboro, fully 57% of traffic stops that resulted in searchers are of vehicles driven by Black or African-American drivers?

This data is compiled data from 2010 – 2014. What happens if we look at the individual years, is there some possible explanation there?

Unfortunately, no, there isn’t.

In 2013 UNCG police searched 110 Black drivers and 69 White drivers.

In 2011 UNCG police searched 170 Black drivers and 147 White drivers.

Even in 2012 when the data shows that only 54 black drivers were searched it still shows the same relationship as only 40 of the white drivers were searched.

No matter the year, the story is the same. Black drivers are searched more often than their white counterparts.  

And here’s another interesting bit of information: more White drivers than Black were stopped for Driving While Impaired (in fact, nearly one third more), more White drivers than Black drivers were stopped for safe movement violations and the same thing for stop light/stop sign violations and vehicle regulatory violations. Black drivers are stopped more often than white drivers for vehicle equipment violations and more often for a category called “investigation.” Black drivers are stopped more often for seat belt violations by almost one third.

In short, the violations that could be considered  most dangerous to others and therefore, least likely to be left to the discretion of any particular officer have a racial composition roughly proportional to the population of Greensboro. Otherwise…well, I don’t think you probably require any help figuring out the rest.

So, this is the police department that we have at UNCG. It’s just one aspect of their job and we can’t paint any individual officer with the brush that was used for this picture of the department overall.

But maybe we should check that brush and see if there isn’t some whitewash still left in the bristles.