Missouri AG illegally removed data showing racial disparity in traffic stops, lawsuit says

Kacen Bayless, The Kansas City Star on May 30, 2025

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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is accused in a new lawsuit of violating state law after allegedly omitting data from the state’s annual vehicle stops report that shows whether minority drivers were stopped by police more frequently than white drivers.

The lawsuit, filed this week by the Missouri NAACP, also alleges that Bailey, a Republican, and the University of Missouri violated the state’s open records law by withholding public records about the decision. The NAACP sought records showing why the data, called a “Disparity Index,” was left out of the 2023 report, which was published last year.

“The Respondent Honorable Attorney General has the present, imperative, and unconditional duty to include a ‘disparity index’ …in his annual report,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Cole County, where Jefferson City is located.

Bailey’s alleged action is particularly noteworthy. The index, a figure calculated by comparing the number of traffic stops with population, has been included in every vehicle stops report since 2000. It has highlighted that police in Missouri pulled over Black drivers at higher rates than white motorists, as disproportionate stops for Black motorists have risen over the past 20 years.

For example, the report released in 2022 showed that Black motorists accounted for 18% of all traffic stops, while Black individuals made up less than 12% of the state’s population.

A spokesperson for Bailey’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. However, the executive summary of that year’s report explains that the vehicle stops report would no longer include the index because the report’s research team determined it was “of limited analytical value.”

“This is because the Disparity Index is both redundant and problematic as a summary measure for understanding differences in traffic stops across population groups,” the executive summary said.

The summary added that the vehicle stops report “already provides detailed information on traffic stops and rates relative to subgroup population, so no new objective information is provided by calculating the index.”

But Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP, said in an interview that Bailey had a legal obligation and a responsibility to create and issue the disparity index as part of the report. He did not do so, Chapel said.

“What I do know is that he is failing to follow the law and that the people who are affected are Black people,” Chapel said. “This law is to ensure that we, Black folks in the state of Missouri, are treated fairly, just like everybody else.”

Bailey’s job, Chapel said, is to “shine the light on it so everybody knows, and he’s refusing to do that.”

The lawsuit asks a judge to issue an order forcing Bailey to publish the disparity index’s calculations both for the state and for the more than 500 police agencies that submitted information on their traffic stops, including the Kansas City Police Department.

Open records violations

The NAACP, in the lawsuit, also alleges that Bailey’s office violated the state’s open records law, called the Sunshine Law. It states that records related to the decision, which were requested by the NAACP in November, have not been provided despite communication that said they would be made available.

In addition to Bailey’s involvement with the report, the University of Missouri also performed calculations of the data that was included in the report. The NAACP sought records about those calculations and, six months later, the university provided more than 44,000 documents.

However, the university, according to the lawsuit, stated in its response that many additional records had been withheld due to their relation to legal actions, confidential information or privileged communications with lawyers.

The NAACP, in its lawsuit, pushed back on this assertion and is asking for a judge to require the university to hand over the rest of the documents. The university, the lawsuit said, “is not involved in legal actions, causes of action or litigation involving the requested documents.”

When asked about the allegations in the lawsuit, University of Missouri spokesperson Christopher Ave said, “we deny liability for the violation alleged in this case and plan to present our defenses in court.”

The attorney general’s office has annually collected and compiled data provided by law enforcement agencies since 2000, a statutory requirement put in place in response to racial profiling concerns.

Bailey’s Republican predecessor as attorney general, now-U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, said in 2022 that the vehicle stops information was meant to help police and the public contextualize yearly stops and discover areas for improvement.

For Chapel, with the NAACP, the report’s omission of the disparity index under Bailey raises a series of questions for the attorney general, who has been in office since 2023.

“The office itself is being used politically to determine what laws will and will not be enforced for and against who,” Chapel said. “What other laws is he refusing to enforce?”

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