RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A judge with the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia issued an opinion earlier this week claiming that the Richmond Police Department engaged in a discriminatory stop after a man was arrested in 2020.
Keith Rodney Moore was taken into custody and ultimately indicted for possessing a firearm and ammunition as a convicted felon after police carried out a traffic stop on Dec. 5, 2020.
According to court documents, Richmond police officers pulled Moore over in the Highland Park neighborhood, where he then left the scene before he was caught and officers found a gun in his car.
Moore and his lawyers filed a motion to have the charges dismissed, claiming that Richmond police officers “selectively stop Black people, and that this selective enforcement led to his current charges.”
A spokesperson with Richmond Police said that there was probable cause for the traffic stop, as officers were investigating a fraudulent 30-day registration tag that was being used illegally.
“This fraudulent tag led to two traffic stops that same night prior to officers observing the same fraudulent tag on the vehicle Mr. Moore was operating,” the police spokesperson said.
On Monday, Feb. 12, District Judge John A. Gibney Jr. released an opinion favoring Moore’s claim.
“Black drivers have a problem in Richmond, Virginia,” Gibney’s opinion reads. “Richmond Police Department (“RPD”) officers stop Black drivers five times more frequently than white drivers. The defendant in this case, Keith Rodney Moore, is one of the Black drivers stopped by RPD officers.”
While the incident predates his time in office, Richmond’s Chief of Police Rick Edwards provided 8News with a statement in response to the judge’s opinion:
The Richmond Police Department does not stop motorists based on race.
The department is committed to decreasing violent crime. We use data that is regularly analyzed to determine where best to allocate resources in an effort to decrease injury and loss of life.
Murder, shootings, shootings into occupied vehicles and occupied dwellings – these are the violent crimes we are attempting to decrease with the presence of officers. Officers deployed throughout the city perform other duties to include making traffic stops when a violation is observed.
I have a deep and long-lasting commitment to protecting the citizens of Richmond and doing so in a manner that is professional, fair, and impartial.
Chief Rick Edwards
Moore’s counsel provided testimony from two experts which the prosecution motioned to exclude from the case.
The first expert, Dr. Eli Coston, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, reviewed data that Richmond Police provided to assess racial disparities in the department’s traffic stops. Coston concluded that “[t]hroughout almost every step of a traffic stop, from the likelihood that a driver is pulled over, to the actions taken during the stop, to the eventual outcome of that stop, Black drivers are at a significant disadvantage compared to White drivers.”
The data concerning this case was gathered between July 1, 2020, and Dec. 6, 2020. The data was available because of the establishment of the Virginia Community Policing Act (VCPA) in April 2020. That act required law enforcement to collect specific information — including race, ethnicity, age and gender — during traffic stops.
According to the judge’s opinion, the data provided showed that 77% of stopped drivers were Black and 14.6% were white. Coston also claimed the data showed a “statistically significant relationship” between a stopped driver’s race and whether or not they would ultimately be arrested.
The prosecution argued that Coston relied on flawed data. It was found that, of the 2,582 analyzed traffic stops, there were “321 instances of exact duplicates in Coston’s data set.”
“After receiving the government’s analysis of the alleged duplicate entries, Coston removed the alleged duplicates and conducted the analysis again,” Gibney said in his written opinion. “Because Coston’s conclusions remained the same after removing the duplications, the initial reliance on these duplicates did not render the analysis unreliable.”
The second defense testimony came from Dr. Marvin Chiles, an assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University, who recounted the history of racial segregation in the City of Richmond as a context for increased crime in Black neighborhoods. According to Chiles, these circumstances led police to adopt tactics of “sitting [at housing projects], waiting, watching” for crime.
“RPD’s focus on Black neighborhoods occurred shortly after it purportedly ‘decentralized all of its patrol functions and instituted a Neighborhood Precinct Plan’ in which three of four RPD precincts ‘correspond to the nearly entirely [B]lack neighborhoods in Richmond,’” Gibney said in his opinion. “Accordingly, the Court finds that Dr. Chiles’s testimony corroborates Moore’s contention that “‘RPD] is pulling over [B]lack drivers five times more often than white drivers because those drivers are [B]lack.’”
The prosecution argued that Chiles’ testimony of the past was not relevant to the case and had no bearing on traffic enforcement in 2020. Gibney denied the prosecution’s motion to exclude Chiles’ testimony because Richmond Police could not provide records “that would assist the Court in more directly understanding the relationship between the racial segregation of Richmond’s neighborhoods and the location of the police precincts.”
“[The VCPA] data was essential to this case. It shows a disgraceful disparity in enforcement of traffic laws, with Black drivers getting the short end of the stick,” Gibney said in his opinion. “Richmond is not the only locality with this problem; the state wide statistics show a remarkable
record of picking on Black drivers. And subsequent reports by the Commonwealth show that the
trend continues. One would think that Virginia’s citizens would cry out in protest over this situation, but they don’t.”
In the conclusion of his opinion, Gibney said the Court would grant Moore’s motion to dismiss the indictment.