Excelsior Springs Police Dept
The vehicle stops data in our city indicates that in every race category, more non-residents were stopped than residents. Applying population percentages of resident drivers to non-resident stops (instead of using statewide or regional population rates) results in inaccurate disparity indexes and significantly misrepresents the data. The calculation presumes that the non-resident population of drivers is exactly identical to our local population rate, which is misleading at best. As a tourist-driven community, we expect to draw visitors from all over the state and the vehicle stops data supports the fact that we stop more non-resident drivers. For the resident stops in our community, the disparity index is in line with our local population rates. In addition, the lower the number of stops of a particular race, the more significantly skewed the disparity index is. In these cases, only a few number of stops significantly impacts the resulting calculations, and it complicates the ability to glean valuable inferences from the data.