ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Since 2000, the attorney general’s office has produced an annual . It outlines disparities in how police departments pull over white drivers vs. Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American drivers. The numbers have nearly always been similar to or higher than 2023, when Black drivers in Missouri were stopped at a rate 60% higher than white drivers.

The traffic stops are broken down by department. Those with high disparity figures often protest that the numbers are meaningless without more study, particularly on whether certain problematic officers are driving the figures, compared to the department as a whole.

A few years back, Phillip Weeks tried to do something about that. The ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ activist asked a few police departments — University City, Webster Groves, ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County — to provide him the vehicle stop data, including figures that would allow him to compare individual officers. The numbers are available because every officer enters their personal identification number — called a Department Service Number — into a computer when they make a traffic stop. Figures for all ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ area departments are on a database called the Regional Justice Information System, or REJIS.

The police departments — and REJIS — told Weeks he couldn’t have access to officers’ DSN numbers, which scuttled the comparison he was trying to run to hold officials accountable. He sued, saying the numbers were public under Missouri’s Sunshine Law. A ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County judge disagreed. So did the Missouri Court of Appeals.

This past Thursday, Weeks’ attorney, Laurence Mass, went before the Missouri Supreme Court, asking the state’s top judges to allow his client to actually add meaning to the vehicle stop report.

“All records are supposed to be public unless exempted,� Mass argued.

Nothing in the Sunshine Law allows a DSN number to be kept from the public, he said.

Attorneys for Webster Groves and ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County argued that the DSN number is a personnel record — even though it regularly appears on public documents, such as police incident reports, traffic tickets and court records.

“These records at their very inception were personnel records used to evaluate our employees,â€� said ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County attorney Matthew Huckaby.

That argument didn’t go over well with Judge W. Brent Powell.

“You could make that argument for any report a police officer prepares,� Powell said. “You could extend that argument saying that anything they write down could be used to evaluate their work. That’s how they evaluate my work.�

Powell’s argument is more than hypothetical. For more than two years, for instance, the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Metropolitan Police Department has used the “personnel recordâ€� argument to hide an audit of its Force Investigative Unit, which investigates police shootings. A federal judge ordered the city to make the report public, finding the “personnelâ€� argument preposterous. The city has appealed the ruling.

Such obstacles have become too common when citizens, journalists or even police officers try to hold law enforcement agencies accountable. Just last week, Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser found that the city of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ “purposely violatedâ€� the Sunshine Law by withholding jail use-of-force records from ArchCity Defenders’ attorney Maureen Hanlon when she requested them in 2021.

“Hopefully, this serves as a wake-up call,� Hanlon said about the judge’s ruling.

That’s what the state’s vehicle stops report was supposed to be when it started nearly a quarter-century ago. It would help determine whether Driving While Black was really a problem in Missouri. When the report demonstrated that it is indeed a problem — year after year — law enforcement officials and lawmakers stopped short of giving citizens a full explanation or a measure of accountability.

So a citizen — Weeks — tried to use public information to do what elected officials wouldn’t do.

The Missouri Supreme Court should let him finish the job.