ROANOKE, Va. – The Roanoke City Police Department is reviewing the way they police people of color, ensuring there is no bias when pulling people over for traffic stops or making arrests.
They do this with their Annual Review of Bias-Based Policing, released on Monday.
The report looks at three areas of data: traffic stops, arrests, and citizen complaints.
They use an equation called the Disproportionality Index, the number of people of a certain race encountered by police divided by the proportional number of people of that race that would be encountered when there is no bias.
When the DI number equals one, that means there is no bias. A higher DI percentage shows more contact than should be expected.
In 2023, the number of White people who were arrested was more frequent than expected, with a DI of 1.48%. For Black people, the DI score was 0.71%, showing less people were arrested than expected.
But for traffic citations, it is the opposite. The data shows an average DI score of 1.37% for Black people for the number of people pulled over for traffic citations.
For White people, the average DI score was 0.86%.
The third way police look at bias-based policing is with citizen-made complaints.
In 2023, 40 complaints were filed out of 103,244 official officer-citizen contacts.
Three of those 40 complaints were about discriminatory conduct. In all of the three cases, the officers involved in the complaints were either exonerated or the case was determined to be unfounded.
As a result of this data, RPD said there is no need to revise their operational directives.
They also said bias-based training is required for Roanoke police officers and refresher training is mandated for officers every two years.
Find the full report, here.