The Dallas Police Department in 2005 responded to 606,975 calls for service and made 231,443 documented traffic contacts, according to an audit presented to the city council’s public safety committee today.

Out of the 838,418 contacts, only 10 (or .001 percent) resulted in a complaint being filed with the Internal Affairs unit alleging racial or other profiling. Seven of those 10 resulted from discretionary stops.

That was not a misprint: only 10 complaints of racial profiling were filed in 838,418 contacts between police and citizens in Dallas through all of 2005.

Of the 10 complaints filed, six were judged to be unfounded, three cases were inconclusive, and one is still under investigation.

Tempest in a Teapot, or Failure to Report?

The chief of the Dallas Police Department admitted that, on an individual incident basis, racial profiling is a difficult proposition to establish.

“The honest answer is based on individual contact with individual citizen, unless you can get inside heart and mind of officer, you can’t prove racial profiling occurred,” said DPD Chief David M. Kunkle. “We do have a very diverse police department. That’s a good control.”

Some council members were skeptical about the low number.

Both Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dr. Elba Garcia and Councilman Leo V. Chaney, Jr., said they number is low because “most people don’t know how to report racial profiling.”

“That minimizes it,” Mr. Chaney said.

Mr. Chaney said he would like to see a breakdown of the geographical location of the incidents of racial profiling.

The smallest ethnic group among the largest three is African Americans, and the largest number involved in traffic incidents is African Americans, Mr. Chaney said. “That’s all I have to say.”

Councilman James Fantroy said he wanted to know how many complaints overall are filed with the Citizens Review Board, to determine if some complaints are categorized as other than racial profiling, when that was a component of the complaint.

Councilman Mitchell Razansky had doubts.

“I know this is a very sensitive issue to some of my colleagues, I don’t see how Dallas has a serious problem with this,” Mr. Razansky said. “You could have had 838,000 complaints and we had only 10. My calculator won’t go that low. That’s amazing.”

He added, “Looks like on a percentage that of the number of contacts made, white people are the most involved in traffic contacts.”

Councilman Ron Natinsky wondered if 1/1000th percentage was even a statistically valid number.

Asked to explain why blacks and Hispanics still represent a slightly higher proportion of those in contact with Dallas Police, Dr. Robert Taylor of the University of North Texas, who helped the police department gather and analyze the data, said it has to do with operational deployment more than racial profiling.

Low Income = Higher Crime = More Contacts

Lower income areas have more crime, and minorities are disproportionately represented in lower income neighborhoods.

“You have to understand, Dallas like other large cities, has initiated a variety of enforcement techniques in low income areas which have disproportionate number of minorities. Unfortunately, in this country a lot of minorities are lower income,” he said.

The Dallas Police Department has taken a number of steps to comply with the Texas Legislature’s mandate that prohibits racial profiling, and requires departments to collect data on racial profiling.

“Racial profiling incurs the cost of eroding the trust between police and citizens, thus undermining the legitimacy of police actions,” Kunkle said. “(Citizens) must believe that they will be judged solely on their own conduct and never on racial generalizations.”

In addition to diversity and sensitivity training required for all officers, the department has installed cameras on 90 of its cruisers, with the plan to install 500 more by October 2006.

Regardless of how the statistics are interpreted, the Dallas Police Department has been upholding state requirements, set down by the Texas Legislature in 2001, for monitoring and tracking racial profiling.

The judgment from Dr. Eric Fritsch and Dr. Robert Taylor, department of criminal justice at the University of North Texas, is that the Dallas Police Department “is in compliance with applicable Texas law on the collection of racial profiling data.”

Kunkle said that although the department will continue to focus on rooting out racial profiling, the statistics won’t tell the tale, and they won’t likely change to where stops match exact racial population percentages.

“Our numbers have not changed in four years. All the cities(in Dallas’ class) have the same kind of disparities in the numbers. As a department we should train, collect the data, (work to ensure we) don’t stigmatize any community, and look at individual officers who have several complaints,” he said.

Inconclusive Data, Difficult Determinations

The police and researchers admit the data collected so far is not conclusive or supportive of any overall conclusion.

And the biggest hurdle, both agree, is determining what data to use to establish a baseline for measuring trends in racial profiling in Dallas.

The initial breakdown of contacts and population percentages reads like this, and appear to show that whites and blacks are more likely to be pulled over by police in traffic stops in numbers disproportionate to their proportion of the city population.

Hispanics, meanwhile, appear less likely to be pulled over, compared to their percentage of the city population.

By the Numbers

Year 2000
* Whites made up 35.3 percent of the population of Dallas, and represented 40.3 percent of all traffic contacts with police.
* Blacks made up 26.3 percent of the population, and represented 33.5 percent of all traffic contacts with police.
* Hispanics made up 35.3 percent of the population, and represented 25 percent of all traffic contacts with police.

Year 2004
* Whites were 30 percent of the population, and 40.3 percent of traffic contacts.
* Blacks were 23.5 percent of the population, and 33.5 percent of traffic contacts.
* Hispanics were 42 percent of the population, and 25 percent of traffic contacts.

The full report can be seen here.

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