Black people and other people of color are consistently overrepresented in interactions with the police, courts, and the carceral system. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is no different. In 2019 Black and Hispanic people represented 46 percent of the county’s population but accounted for 78 percent of the jail population. The University of North Carolina School of Government’s Criminal Justice Innovation Lab shows that in Mecklenburg County, 5 of the 10 most charged offenses (PDF) are regulatory in nature, meaning they involve stops for low-level or nonmoving violations that do not address public safety. Many of these are traffic stops by law enforcement officers that put people in contact with law enforcement and subsequently enter them into the criminal legal system. Traffic stops, particularly stops of Black or Brown people, can end in trauma and police use of force. The racial disparities in traffic stops owe partially to the amount of discretion officers have to conduct stops, even when a crime or violation may not have been committed.
To reduce the harms caused by police, a coalition of organizations in Mecklenburg County began working together to help people access and use relevant policing data for advocacy and community organizing. The focus of this work was to advocate for eliminating county administrative traffic stops and strengthening those organizations’ capacity to press for additional reform.
Leveraging technology and partnerships to make data actionable
Data on the overpolicing of Black communities and other communities of color need to be easily accessible so the urgency of reforming the US criminal legal system can be illuminated. Clear data enable many stakeholders, including people with criminal records and their family members, service providers, faith communities, community leaders, and concerned residents, to examine racial disparities. They also enable them to tell their stories to advocate for equitable policies and practices that can hold criminal legal agencies accountable for making progress with reforms.
With Catalyst Grant Program funding, Forward Justice, in partnership with the Mecklenburg County chapter of the NC Second Chance Alliance, enhanced its development of the website NC CopWatch as a part of their Police Accountability/Regulatory Stops Campaign. This website provides a platform for North Carolina residents to access law enforcement data on traffic stops and searches and use of force. The data come directly from law enforcement agencies as a result of North Carolina general statute 143B section 903, which requires the North Carolina Department of Public Safety to collect law enforcement traffic statistics.
In the NC CopWatch dashboards, Forward Justice transforms the raw data reported to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation into easy-to-understand visualizations. Each law enforcement agency in North Carolina has its own page that community members can easily search for, and users can also view all statewide data. The data do not include drivers’ names, but users can search for a stop that they or someone they know has experienced based on the date and location. Though the data do not include officers’ names or badge numbers, each officer has a unique number that can be used to analyze stops by that officer. The data are updated monthly, and Forward Justice reaches out by phone to agencies that have been slow to include their data.
Although the data on NC CopWatch are robust, just having data available is not enough to propel change. The data need to be understood by and useful to residents so they can ask for reform. To address this, Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance conducted interactive trainings and developed activist guidebooks to help people understand the data and how to use them in reform efforts. Engaging directly with the community, they also invited community members to attend events, often held at NC Second Chance Alliance chapter meetings, to educate them on how to use the website and its functions.
In addition to walking community members through how to use the website, Forward Justice encouraged them to provide feedback. Community members became part of the website-building process and helped Forward Justice make the website’s functions more user-friendly and intuitive. At one NC Second Chance Alliance chapter meeting, pivoting from a Wi-Fi issue that meant they couldn't do their prepared presentation, the team encouraged attendees to pull the website up on their phones and follow along as the team walked them through it. This not only made the presentation more interactive but highlighted issues with accessing the site on a mobile device. The team addressed this feedback with the web developers to make the mobile version as user-friendly as possible.
Introducing residents to the website was the first step in ensuring they had a data tool they could use to educate themselves and push for changes they wanted to see. NC CopWatch enables community members to identify and visualize problems, and the educational events enabled them to engage with the website and ask questions about what they could do with the data.
Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance also knew that a few in-person meetings were not enough to ensure the ongoing use of the website to advance local policy change.
They began producing community resources residents could use to increase data transparency and literacy around discriminatory policing.
That work culminated in the development of an NC CopWatch toolkit (the North Carolina Traffic Stops Policy Advocacy toolkit) for residents about aspects of education and engaging in efforts for change in criminal justice reform. The toolkit will be informed by residents and reflect feedback and questions the team received at the NC Second Chance Alliance events. Structured into three sections—the problem, the solution, and the players—the toolkit will help residents use the website and find their place in the solution. Further, the toolkit will help community members articulate their concerns and use their lived experiences, along with the NC CopWatch data, to hold local and state governments accountable and inform eventual proposals for change made to policymakers. The toolkit will also be formatted in such a way that any community or police department with similar goals can use it.
The team also developed and publicly posted user tutorial videos. These videos walk through the website’s user experience and how to interpret graphs and other charts. Providing different types of engagement materials ensures community members with different learning styles and accessibility needs can engage in the work.
Using data to advocate for criminal legal system reform
In parallel to expanding access to data and training on using data for community members, Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance do work to inform policymakers. In February 2022, organizers from these groups began discussing their proposals for ending regulatory stops in Charlotte-Mecklenburg with their staffs and chapter members. Soon after, they reached out to the sheriff’s department to ask for its preliminary support. With an informal agreement for reform in place, attorneys presented, on behalf of Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance, a formal proposal to Sheriff Garry McFadden, sharing findings from the data which showed Black drivers were targeted more often by regulatory stops.
The sheriff was persuaded by the data and announced a new policy, enacted in September 2022, ending traffic stops for certain nonmoving violations, including driving with a revoked license or with improper equipment, such as a broken taillight. The advocacy and community engagement done by Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance, including the educational meetings and active feedback sessions, along with the data collected and publicized on NC CopWatch, provided the missing context needed to make the case for eliminating regulatory stops. The two groups are continuing their collaboration to increase data transparency and advocate for racial equity in the criminal legal system. For example, as policies are changed, the CopWatch website can be used to investigate impacts.
Through the Catalyst Grant Program, Forward Justice and the NC Second Chance Alliance not only accomplished the above reform but illustrated the important role data transparency and availability can play in policy-change efforts. When data are available, communities and policymakers alike can identify inequitable treatment, are more informed of where change is needed, and can begin taking steps to make that change.
Visit the Catalyst Grant Program Insights page for more resources and stories about the grantees.
