For years, many people in the Dayton area have been concerned that African-American drivers were stopped at a disproportionate rate when they drove through Oakwood.
Indeed, in 2001, the Dayton Daily News did a study of traffic stops in Oakwood. It found that 18.4% of drivers who got tickets in Oakwood were African-American while less than .5% of the residents of Oakwood were African-American. (Dayton Daily News, “Oakwood Cites High Percentage of Blacks,” Mara Lee, March 1, 2001.) In response to the articles and community pressure, the City of Oakwood agreed to collect more comprehensive data on stops. (Dayton Daily News, “Oakwood to Track Traffic Stops by Race,” Mara Lee, May 2, 2001.)
In 2016, after Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) was contacted by the Montgomery County Public Defender who was concerned that those appearing in Oakwood municipal court for traffic violation were overwhelmingly African-American, ABLE decided to look at the Oakwood data to see what was happening.
To that end, we requested detailed data on each traffic stop and each ticket written in 2016 from the Oakwood law director and met with him on several occasions to understand the data and how best to analyze it. The data was provided to us in a format that was difficult to work with, but with some effort we were able to overcome those difficulties and perform an analysis.
The purpose in doing this analysis was to see whether there was evidence of bias in how tickets were issued by the Oakwood police.