Our Lips Are Sealed:  Whatever Happened to the Moorhead Traffic Stop Data?

Mark Hansel is a professor at MSUM. He is middle-aged and he is white. Near Mark sits Muhammad. Muhammad is an MSUM student and has been a member of our community since age 11. Muhammad is Black, and he is almost six times more likely to be pulled over in Moorhead than Mark. Cindy is a woman in her mid-30s. She is a paralegal, has two kids, and is Hispanic. Cindy is 70 percent more likely to be pulled over than Mark. These were some of the findings of the 2002 Traffic Stop report by Mark. Needless to say, he was the center of attention at the Traffic Stop Data Group meeting Wednesday at PEPP (People Escaping Poverty Project) in Moorhead.

Our Lips Are Sealed

Mark related to attendants at Wednesday’s meeting that he participated in a follow-up traffic-stop report for 2003, and yet another in 2004. He informed those present that this information was off-limits as a professional courtesy to the Moorhead Police Department, although he did not say that he was specifically instructed not to share the information.

Tammie Yak of the Moorhead Human Rights Commission (MHRC) knows the MPD’s sentiments toward releasing the 2003 and 2004 traffic stop data all too well. She said PEPP’s Traffic Stop Data Group approached the MHRC in attempt to acquire this information. “I contacted Chief Ebinger, and he really wasn’t very happy to talk to me,” Yak said.

“He kind of put me off, being kind of, ‘Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and so I talked to him again. I emailed him all the information we needed to know, and who had done the study, and he just really didn’t get back to us. Finally I called him and said we’d like to see it, and he said, ‘It’s of no use to you, you don’t need those numbers, and I won’t release them if there’s something [in the study] against the department.’”

She continued. “We had sent a letter like a month before that and didn’t get a response, and then didn’t get a response to email, and then didn’t get a response to phone calls…”

This writer had a similar experience attempting to acquire such illusive reports. An employee of the Moorhead Law Enforcement Center informed me that she actually had the reports at one time, but “it is now in his [Ebinger’s] possession.” This claim seems to contradict Yak’s initial response from the chief.

This employee also said Ebinger was out of town. She said his office was being remodeled, muttering something about new furniture, and that it would be difficult to find the documents amid the chaos.

Although the chief and MPD have never openly denied access to the reports, the public has not been able to see them. The reports are now four and five years old.

What’s There to Hide?

Ebinger wrote in a memorandum dated Jan. 11 addressed to “all sworn police personnel,” that “racial profiling does not occur in our department.”

However, the 2002 Traffic Stop data said, “…when MPD Peace Officers know a Latino citizen’s ethnicity before a stop, they are twice as likely to conduct a vehicle search than when they lack prior knowledge of driver ethnicity. There is a similar relationship among American Indians, but the numbers are smaller and less reliable.”

This was not the first time the city of Moorhead had been criticized for matters of civil rights. In 1999, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported that Moorhead’s minorities experienced unfair treatment from the law enforcement and court system. The report also discussed several minority residents’ experiences of ethnic and racial prejudice.

The 1999 report also stated, “Both minorities and white residents in Moorhead consider race relations a social problem. 76 percent of responding white residents and 64 percent of minority respondents indicated that race relations and equal opportunity for minorities are social problems in Moorhead.”

Although these studies seem to show Moorhead in a bad light, one must see the data in proper context. Moorhead’s traffic stop data matched up pretty evenly with the rest of the participants in the Minnesota Statewide Racial Profiling Report. It was better than some, worse than others, but the grander issue is that Minnesota as a whole did poorly in this study.

The Minnesota Statewide Racial Profiling Aggregate Report, concluded that, “A basic pattern emerges from our analysis of traffic stop data collected by the 65 law enforcement jurisdictions that voluntarily participated in this racial profiling study: Law enforcement officers stopped Black, Latino, and American Indian drivers at greater rates than White drivers, searched Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at greater rates than White drivers, and found contraband as a result of searches of Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians at lower rates than in searches of White drivers.”

Citizens Want Answers

Evidence indicates that we have some civil rights issues in our area, and apparently throughout the entire state of Minnesota. Evidence this compelling merits some community discussion.

According to Tammie Yak, “…we were not looking for controversy. We just simply wanted the data so we could start a conversation, and we wanted to compare it to 2002 to see if there had been any change, and right away, he [Chief Ebinger] turned it into this huge controversy.”

Yak continued, “Our thought is that it is public data, because public funds paid for it.”

In Moorhead’s initial 2002 traffic data report, a lot of statements are made regarding the validity of the statistics. It criticizes the means by which the information was gathered, and is littered with justifications for the outcomes. In that report, it was concluded that further study was needed, and that the means of research needed to be fine-tuned.

Presumably these issues have been addressed in the follow-up studies. Why then are the people not being allowed to see it? What is there to hide? Did Moorhead exhaust their excuses in 2002?

There is no conclusive evidence that the MPD is necessarily racist, nor is there conclusive evidence that Moorhead’s police department is particularly more racist than others. There is evidence, however, that these racist trends are bigger than Moorhead. Addressing the greater issue starts at the community level. Chief Ebinger is withholding important pieces of the community puzzle—information the people want.

How can any community solve the puzzle when there are key pieces missing?

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