Dallas PD: No Racial Profiling Here

City Hall and most other municipal facilities are closed till Tuesday, furlough day and President's Day and all. Which means council briefings normally posted on Friday night went live last night, including this one that'll be presented to the Public Safety Committee on Tuesday: 2010 Dallas Police Department Traffic Contact...

By Robert Wilonsky

February 18, 2011

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City Hall and most other municipal facilities are closed till Tuesday, furlough day and President's Day and all. Which means council briefings normally posted on Friday night went live last night, including this one that'll be presented to the Public Safety Committee on Tuesday: 2010 Dallas Police Department Traffic Contact Data Annual Report, which looks at how many traffic stops DPD made last year -- and, more to the point, who DPD pulled over in 2010.

As Chief David Brown writes in his dear-citizens letter dated yesterday, the ninth annual report "provides an overview of contacts, distributed by race, and arrests and searches resulting from those traffic contacts." It also looks at how many of those pulled over complained to Internal Affairs alleging racial profiling -- and, says the doc, out of the 198,608 "documented traffic contacts" charted above, only 10 complaints were filed. And, according to the report, eight of those were ruled "unfounded," while the other two remain under investigation. (Matter of fact, according to DPD all allegations of racial profiling since 2007 have been "unfounded" or "not sustained.")

"We are confident that the information contained in this report will serve as further evidence of our commitment to fair and equitable treatment of all citizens," Brown writes, "and that it will serve as a foundation to strengthen our bond with our community."

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