Racial disparities are widespread within the U.S. criminal justice system, with racial and ethnic minorities being over-represented throughout, from stops to arrests to imprisonment. As noted by Josephine Ross, a law professor at Howard University who recently wrote “A New Exclusionary Rule to Protect Bodily Integrity and Discourage Pretext Stops“  for the Seattle University Law Review, it has debased American policing, especially in regard to  traffic stops and pedestrian stops and frisks. In considering the extent of this issue in Washington, I focused on the annual number of “traffic stops” made by the Washington State Patrol (WSP) over a three year period, using data found in the WSP’s 2025 Traffic Stop Demographic Report: 2022-2024. Although this report claims to use population data taken from the state’s official source, the Data and Research Division of the Office of Financial Management (OFM), the WSP population data does not match the OFM population data. Thus, I also used the OFM population data as a means of comparison.

The WSP population data are reported in seven groups: White, Black, Native, Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Other, along with annual total population counts for each of the three years, 2022, 2023, 2024. The WSP report provides traffic stops for each of these seven population groups over seven categories: (1) Total Traffic Contacts; (2) Total Traffic Contacts – misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor, and felony (labeled as “Total Traffic Contacts – Criminal Felony” in the WSP 2025 report); (3) Traffic contacts – Infractions issued; (4) Traffic Contacts – Written Warnings Issued; (5) Traffic Contacts – Verbal Warnings Issued; (6) High-Discretion Searches; and (7) Low-Discretion Searches.

The WSP’s Traffic Stop Demographic Report uses population data to provide per-capita stop data. In looking at total traffic contacts in 2022: the per capita rate of stops for the White population was 73.2 contacts per 1,000; for the Black population, per capita rate was 146.7 per 1,000.  In relation to the White Population, the per-capita traffic contact rate for the Black population is approximately two times higher, an indication of racial profiling

The use of a “per capita” measure is not widely used in everyday discussions, social science research, or criminal justice research. Instead, the concept of “odds” is far more commonly used. For example, one is more likely  to hear, “What are the odds of being pulled over if I am driving over the speed limit” than “What is the per capita rate of being pulled over  for driving over the speed limit?” I recently used “odds ratios” in an expert report I prepared for plaintiffs in a  lawsuit involving racial profiling by the Beverly Hills (California) Police Department (BHPD). I also use it here to analyze the WSP traffic stop data.

An odds ratio is used to compare the probability of an event occurring in each of two groups. When an odds ratio is 1, there is no difference in the odds between two groups. When it is greater than 1, the odds ratio indicates a higher level in one group over the other: 2.00 means an event is twice as likely to occur in one group over the other( Baker, Swanson, Tayman, and Tedrow, 2017).  As an example, the odds of rolling a seven with two dice is 6.00 times more likely than rolling snake eyes (a two).

Because law enforcement racial profiling has a long history and remains widespread, especially in regard to the Black population,  I looked at the odds of being stopped by the WSP if one is Black relative to one being White. The table below shows these odds ratios from 2024, using both census data from the Office of Financial Management (black font)and the Washington State Patrol population (red font) data across all seven stop categories.

Clearly, whether one uses the OFM population data or the WSP population data, the odds of a Black person being stopped are higher than 1.00 in every category, which suggests that there was racial profiling by the WSP in conducting traffic stops during 2024. Notably, the odds ratios are consistently lower when using the OFM population data, which implies that the WSP is doing itself a disservice in using their own population data.

Looking at the 2023 data, and again using both the OFM population and the WSP population data across the seven stop categories, I found the following:

As in 2024, whether one uses the OFM population data or the WSP population data, the odds of being stopped if Black in 2023 are nearly 2 (1.91) times higher than the odds of being stopped if White. This suggests there was also racial profiling by the WSP in conducting traffic stops in 2023. Unlike 2024 however, the odds of being stopped in 2023 were slightly higher for the Black population than the White population in five of the seven categories using the OFM population data.

Using both the OFM and the WSP population data across the seven stop categories, I found the following odds in the 2022 data.

Once again, like 2024 and 2023, whether one uses the OFM population data or the WSP population data, the odds of being stopped in 2022 if Black are higher than 1.00 relative to the odds of being stopped if White. This suggests that there was racial profiling by the WSP in conducting traffic stops in 2022,  which is unlike the mixed picture in 2023, and completely opposite the picture in 2024. In 2022, the odds across all seven traffic stop categories in the OFM population data are higher for the Black population than White.

Looking at the average of the odds ratios across the seven traffic stop categories over each of the three years, I found: (1) when using the WSP population data, the average dropped from 2.50 in 2022 to 2.32 in 2023, then increased to 2.51 in 2024. (2) Using the OFM population data, the average dropped from 2.57 in 2022 to 2.33 in 2023 and increased to 2.48 in 2024. The lack of any significant change between 2022 and 2024 suggests that the same level of racial profiling exists in regard to the WSP traffic stops in terms of the Black population relative to the White population.

While this analysis suggests racial profiling is present in the WSP’s actions, it is nothing like what I found in analyzing data in the lawsuit against the Beverly Hills Police Department, mentioned earlier. In regard to  the department as a whole, the odds of being arrested or cited as a Black person in Beverly Hills was 4.4 times higher than for a non-Black person. In terms of its “Rodeo Drive Team,” the odds were 78.2 times higher. Viewed in this light, the Washington State Patrol is an agency that, gratefully, does not cast as high a level of shame on the state in terms of its level of racial profiling as the Beverly Hills Police Department does on the city of Beverly Hills.

Turning back to the article in the Seattle University Law Review  by Josephine Ross mentioned at the outset, these results support the need for adoption of a legislative rule in Washington state that is aimed at discouraging  police to engage in pretext frisks and pretext traffic stops, thereby removing two avenues where racial profiling has flourished.