Effective July 1, 2021, the Community Policing Act (CPA) was expanded to include not only reporting on traffic stops made by law enforcement, but also reporting on non-traffic (“pedestrian") stops involving stop and frisk and other investigatory detentions. As with the traffic stop reporting, the CPA requires the collection and reporting of pedestrian stop factors such as the reporting agency, the reason for the stop, the demographic characteristics of the person(s) stopped, and the outcome of the stop. This is the second year in which DCJS has analyzed and reported on pedestrian stop data.

This report, the “2023 Report on Analysis of Stops Collected under Virginia’s Community Policing Act: Pedestrian Supplement" (“2023 Pedestrian Supplement" report) is a supplement to the “2023 Report on Analysis of Traffic Stop Data Collected Under Virginia’s Community Policing Act" (“2023 Traffic Stop" report). This supplement contains descriptive findings on 7,413 statewide pedestrian stops from 155 law enforcement agencies (LEAs), collected by the Virginia State Police (VSP) for FY2023.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services’ (DCJS) examination of the second year of reported pedestrian stop data includes a similar number of cases as were reported for FY2022, and the same limitations continue to restrict DCJS’ ability to analyze and interpret the data. As noted in the DCJS 2023 report on traffic stop data collection, LEAs continue to face numerous challenges implementing the reporting mandate. Among these challenges are a lack of resources needed to comply with the mandate (especially for smaller agencies), and a lack of clarity in the legislative language defining what types of pedestrian stops to include in the reporting. This supplement report reiterates recommendations to help address these challenges.

Because of these data limitations, the contents of this report should be viewed more as describing the current state of the pedestrian stop reporting system, and not as an accurate description of how many pedestrians were stopped, or of the characteristics of the individuals stopped or the circumstances of the stops.

Nonetheless, DCJS has a mandate to report its findings based on the data available for this second-year report. With that caveat in mind, the major findings from the data are

• The majority (87.8%) of pedestrian stops continue to be Terry Stops or “Other" investigative type stops, although that is a decrease of 6.9% from the previous year’s rate of 94.7%. 12.1% (901) of pedestrian stops were for a traffic or equipment violation, which was an increase from 5.3% (409) in FY2022. (Terry Stops are considered “reasonable" searches not requiring a warrant so long as they are brief and the officer believes that criminal activity may be afoot and the suspect may be armed and presently dangerous).

• The percentage of pedestrian stops resulting in no enforcement action being taken decreased from 30.7% to 22.8%. Conversely, the percentage of stops resulting in a warning (33.7%) or citation/summons (24%) increased proportionately.

• The percentage of subjects arrested decreased slightly to 19.5% (from 20.7%) of pedestrian stops. The percentage of subjects searched declined to 19.7% from the previous year’s rate of 23.6%.

• Physical force by either party remained rare in pedestrian stops. Officer force against the subject of a stop was reported for only 1.2% of stops, and subject force against an officer was reported for only 1.1% of stops.

• Black subjects continue to be stopped at higher rates than White subjects. Although only 19.7% of Virginia’s population aged 10+ in the dataset were Black, 43.8% of subjects stopped were Black.

• Although the percentage of stop subjects who had a search of their person conducted decreased overall, Black stop subjects continued to be searched at higher rates than White subjects. 23.7% of Black subjects were searched, compared to 14.6% of White subjects.

• Black subjects stopped were also arrested at higher rates than either White or Hispanic subjects. 25% of Black subjects were arrested, compared to 13.9% of White subjects and 21.9% of Hispanic subjects.

• Hispanic subjects (of any race) were stopped at a similar rate to White subjects. Hispanics made up 9.3% of Virginia’s population aged 10+ in the dataset, and they made up 9.4% of subjects stopped.

• Hispanic stop subjects were searched at higher rates than White subjects. 26.6% of stopped Hispanic subjects had a search of their person conducted, compared to 14.6% of White subjects.

• Hispanic subjects stopped were arrested at higher rates than White subjects. 21.9% of stopped Hispanic subjects were arrested, compared to 13.9% of White subjects.

• American Indian/Alaskan Native and Asian/Pacific Islander subjects rarely occurred in the pedestrian stop dataset. Only 12 American Indian/Alaskan Native subjects, and 117 Asian/Pacific Islander subjects, were reported. Given these small numbers, any findings on searches and arrests for these groups are likely due to random chance from isolated incidents.

During pedestrian stop data collection, DCJS continues to observe broad variations in the numbers of pedestrian stops reported across agencies; in some cases, some agencies serving localities with large populations reported making fewer pedestrian stops than some much smaller agencies. Additionally, many agencies reported varying interpretations as to which “investigatory detentions" required pedestrian stop data collection.

Based on interviews conducted by DCJS and VSP with several Virginia LEA’s, and findings from the FY2022 data collection survey, DCJS identified a number of recurring factors that appeared to be driving the variations seen in the reporting. To address these issues, and to generally improve DCJS’s ability to meet the intent of the CPA legislation, DCJS reintroduces the following recommendations from the 2022 Pedestrian Supplement report:

PEDESTRIAN SUPPLEMENT RECOMMENDATION #1: Virginia should examine the need to provide resources to smaller law enforcement agencies that had difficulty implementing the CPA data collection and reporting requirements. Assistance could be provided in several ways, such as helping these agencies train staff on reporting requirements and practices and providing them with more effective data collection tools such as a statewide electronic summons application.

PEDESTRIAN SUPPLEMENT RECOMMENDATION #2: The General Assembly should consider providing more specific definition on the types of investigatory detentions which require CPA data collection. The “VSP Instructions and Technical Specifications Version 5.3" includes a section providing clarification on investigatory detentions; however, the addition of pedestrian stops to the collection mandate has introduced many nuanced detention scenarios which are ultimately left up to the interpretive judgement of individual LEAs on whether or not to report them as Community Policing Act data.

PEDESTRAIN SUPPLEMENT RECOMMENDATION #3: Collect data on searches made for contraband during traffic stops, and the results of the searches, and add this data to the CPA database. Because the search rate among pedestrian stops is about ten times higher than for that for traffic stops, data on the results of each search is even more informative for the pedestrian dataset. Furthermore, information on the type of contraband yielded would allow DCJS to calculate how often Terry Stops uncover a weapon in the subject’s possession.

PEDESTRAIN SUPPLEMENT RECOMMENDATION #4: Consider amending Community Policing Act legislation to change the annual report deadline from July 1 to November 1.

DCJS suggests this change for both the traffic and pedestrian stop reports. In future years, this would allow DCJS to prepare traffic and pedestrian stop reports which are based on a full 12-month fiscal year of data, rather than on only nine-months of data.

DCJS also reintroduces the recommendation from the 2023 Traffic Stop report in the context of the pedestrian dataset:

STANDING RECOMMENDATION: The percentages and Disparity Indexes (DIs) presented in this report should not be interpreted to indicate that any individual law enforcement agency is practicing bias-based profiling. Given the limitations noted above, these figures should only be used to identify where the numbers indicate that certain ethnic/racial groups are being disproportionately stopped, which may bear further review to identify why this is occurring and whether any action should be considered to reduce or eliminate it.

This is a standing recommendation given the limitations of the CPA’s current data fields. In addition, any year-to-year comparison of CPA findings should take into consideration both methodological differences and external factors involved in each year’s report.