NH Police Stops

This project is years in the making, so it is important to understand its somewhat sordid history. Back in 2023, a team began this project to build on Granite State’s 2022 investigative series about NH's Mobile Enforcement Team (MET), which found this drug-interdiction unit was using minor traffic violations as pretexts to conduct searches that disproportionately impacted Black and minority drivers. The initial Justice Media teams thought they found disparities, but another team in 2024 figured out the data was severely flawed and missing race in many records. With a lot of reporting and data analysis, they figured out the New Hampshire State Police had stopped collecting race data altogether! Reporting and writing this story about how they aren’t collecting this data is one of the JO teammate’s tasks this semester. While the spring 2025 team was reporting on the missing race data, we came to legally possess data that includes additional fields including names of the people who were stopped. With this new data, we want to try to assign race to the names with enough accuracy to determine if there is still a racial disparity in stops. This project consists of two stories: Story #1 Missing race data & impacts Story #2: Racial disparity in stops with new data The team will investigate: • Whether racial disparities persist in available data • Geographic and temporal patterns in traffic stops • The relationship between initial stop reasons (e.g., speeding) and subsequent searches/arrests