Richmond Heights Police Dept
The City of Richmond Heights contains two major highways to include an interchange between them both. Ad- ditionally, Richmond Heights houses the area's major metropolitan retail center, a hospital and several county thoroughfares. As a result, the daytime population can exceed five times the actual population of the City as drivers from outside this jurisdiction pass through regularly. This is evidenced by the discrepancies in the disparity indices between resident and non-resident population. These discrepancies highlight the flaw in this study which is to assume that a city with a population (less than 9,000) and geographical size (2.3 square miles) such as Richmond Heights is reflective of the population of the greater St. Louis area. More specifically, Richmond Heights has an African American population percentage of just over 11% while African Americans make up 18% of the greater St. Louis area population. This must be taken into consideration when analyzing traffic stop data from smaller municipalities. Percentage differences like this within small municipalities will create a greater disparity index and reflect a false im- pression of bias. When measuring the disparity index using the percentage of the greater area population rather than the small population of Richmond Heights, the Richmond Heights disparity index drops by 40%.