Council receives police racial profiling report

In a very short meeting, the Moulton City Council received the 2023 racial profiling report from the Moulton Police Department at the Jan. 9 meeting.

“The racial profiling report is something that we have been required (to give to the governing body) for years and years,” Police Chief Daniel Beyer said. “There was a law passed from legislators that all the (police) departments in the state of Texas track the citations of racial ethnicity. This includes all stops, citations, and arrest.”

This law was passed all the way back in 2001.

“The reason why this law was passed was because there were allegations that law enforcement were racially profiling drivers and this is a way of tracking that,” Beyer said.

The racial profiling report showed that there were a total of 1,011 traffic stops in 2023 for the city of Moulton.

“With regards to race and ethnicities, we break it down from Asian, black, white, and Hispanics,” Beyer said. “Out of those (1,011) traffic stops we had six Asians, 68 blacks, 622 whites, and 315 Hispanics. It also breaks it down by gender. We stopped 288 females and 723 males.”

The report also exhibited that 51 people received verbal warnings and 733 had written warnings. Of the vebal warnings, four were black, 40 were white, and seven were Hispanics. There were no Asians that were given verbal warnings. The statistics for written warnings showed that out of 733; 45 were black, 484 were white, 199 were Hispanic and five were Asian.

The remaining traffic stops included 227 citations. Out of those numbers, 19 were black, 98 were white, 109 were Hispanic, and there was one Asian.

At the same meeting, Moulton City Council also approved ordinances for the 2024 election.

“This is just for calling the general election and the special election,” City secretary LuAnn Rogers said. “The city has a street maintenance tax. That’s a portion of the sales tax that we receive, and it has to be reauthorized by the voters every four years. It’s now time for it to come up for the election.”