BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – As the Burlington Police Department prepares to release its annual traffic enforcement report later this month, Police Chief Jon Murad says he’s concerned with new data that shows an increase in the percentage of traffic stops involving Black drivers. It comes as the overall number of traffic stops in the city is down 90% from a decade ago.
Police say Black drivers made up less than 10% of the driving population in 2023 but were involved in 15% of traffic stops, the highest rate in the last five years.
“Is this something that is being affected by our posture? Whether that is any sort of plans or operations or certain kinds of deployments or is this the result of officer or other employee bias — and that’s something that we really would find intolerable and unacceptable,” said Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad.
Murad did not point to what is specifically driving the uptick. The chief says one officer within the department conducted more than 200 stops in 2023 but did not reflect the disparity, while others who only accounted for roughly 30 a piece, did.
“One thing I am contemplating doing is making every single one of those stops available in narrative form for the public to review itself. We want to make certain that we are always confronting any kind of incidents that we’ve got, where we know that we can improve or if we see that we need to explain what it is that we’re doing,” he said.
While traffic data shows a major decrease in the number of stops over the last five years, preliminary data for last year shows traffic incidents increased to 766. Murad notes that officers use discretion when it comes to stops and are instructed to intervene when safety is a concern. “We want traffic stops when they are interrupting behavior that is dangerous on the road and making our community unsafe,” he said.