Thread by @Grits4Breakfast

Been digging deeper into Texas' 2019 #SandraBland data and Houston is a big outlier.

Of agencies reporting to @TCOLE under Texas' racial profiling statute, @houstonpolice account for 3% of traffic stops statewide and 29% of all use-of-force incidents reported at those stops.

HPD reported the highest use-of-force rate among large TX agencies at 71 incidents per 10K stops. Statewide avg around 8 force incidents per 10K stops. (N.b., this only captures force at traffic stops, not all UoF incidents.)

Source (columns J and HK): tcole.texas.gov/content/racial…

Together, Houston and DPS accounted for about half of reported force incidents at traffic stops statewide in 2019 (3,739 out of 7,866). But DPS performed 8x as many stops. If HPD used force at same rate as @TXDPS (5.2/10K), they'd have had >2,000 fewer force incidents last year.

This is the 2nd year Texas law enforcement agencies have reported use-of-force data from traffic stops (thanks @GFColeman and @whitmire_john!), and the 2nd time Houston has had the highest use-of-force rate among large jurisdictions.

If you're wondering, TX agencies reported about 9.5 million traffic stops in 2019. DPS did ~2.8 million of them.

Houston PD reported only 332,013 stops, but used force at 2,285 of them compared to 1,454 force incidents by DPS troopers.

Weirdly, third behind DPS and Houston in stop totals was the @SanAngeloPolice, who performed 258,803 traffic stops in 2019. That's 86% more stops than Austin or San Antonio and 177% more stops than Dallas. Force rates are low, but wow! What's going on there?

Errata: 10 smaller agencies' data were discarded bc they reported force at every stop - an obvious reporting error. The above calculations were made excluding those data.