Carl Junction Police Dept
A large portion of our agency's traffic stops occur on Hwy. 171 which is a major highway connecting Southeast Kansas and Southwest Missouri, Hwy. 49 to Arkansas, and Hwy. 71 to Kansas City. It also provides the main road between Pittsburg State University in Kansas to Joplin, Missouri. This also makes it a popular corridor for drug transportation between the states. Also, I believe there is an assumption that the officers know the race of the driver of the vehicle before it is stopped in your data collection. The truth is there is an average 13.5 hours of daylight during the year, it is very difficult, if not impossible to tell the race of drivers during night time hours, and it is my observation that it is not always possible to determine the race of a driver before a traffic stop during daylight hours. There is a 'time of stop” space on the traffic stop data sheet, but it is not asked for on the report. Due to this corridor, and the amount of our traffic stops on that roadway, there is a much larger range and percentage of all races/ethnicities passing through that is not reflected in our city population. I believe that due to this, it skews our VSR report when looking at our population statistics only.