movsr is research software designed to scrape and reformat the
Missouri Attorney General’s Office annual
vehicle stop reports.
These data are important because they have the potential to reveal
continued inequities in Missouri’s criminal justice system. The
Department of Justice’s
report
on the Ferguson Police Department, for example, highlights the way
traffic tickets have been as an approach to revenue generation:
Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the role of Ferguson’s municipal court. The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.
These same practices have also been discussed in the Ferguson Commission’s report and have been the subject of some attempted reforms.
Yet, despite continued tracking of traffic stops at the state level since 2000 and the increased attention paid to policing practices in the region after Michael Brown’s death, disparities in traffic stops remain. Many departments stop greater numbers of African Americans than the composition of the driving age population would predict. For example, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s traffic data suggests that African Americans, who make up 45% of the city’s population, account for over 60% of traffic stops:
This package’s website offers an initial analyses of the 2017 vehicle stop report data for St. Louis City and County.
The package’s website offers a
walk through in the Get started
article for
using movsr for scraping and formatting vehicle stop data as well as
documentation
for project specific functions.
The movsr software can be accessed from GitHub with remotes:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("slu-openGIS/movsr")Additional details, including some tips for installing and using Docker, can be found in the Get started article as well.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.