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The Police Accountability Task Force of Howard County (PATF-HoCo) finds a 3-year pattern of racial and ethnic disparities in policing by the Howard County Police Department: for example, data reveals African American residents are twice as likely to get pulled over for a traffic stop, while representing only 20% of the Howard County population.
Multi-Year Data Reveals Persistent Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Howard County Policing; and Oversight Bodies designed for Transparency, Failed to Act
Howard County, MD — The Police Accountability Task Force of Howard County (PATF-HoCo) released a comprehensive multi-year analysis of police arrest, juvenile referral, and traffic-stop data that reveals persistent and extreme racial/ethnic disparities affecting Black and Hispanic residents, from 2022 through 2024 (for arrests and juvenile referrals) and from 2020-2024 (for traffic stops).
The data, obtained directly from the Howard County Police Department (HCPD) through Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) requests and supplemented by the Maryland RaceBased Traffic Stop Dashboard, shows that these disparities repeat year after year, indicating systemic problems rather than isolated incidents.
Key Findings
Black / African American residents: Approximately 20% of the county population experienced:
2–3 times their population share in adult arrests
3–4 times their population share in juvenile arrests and referrals
2 times their population share in traffic stops
Hispanic residents: Approximately 8% of the county population were also consistently overrepresented across arrests and traffic stops throughout all three years.
“These patterns did not appear once and disappear, they persisted every year,” said Ted Stewart of PATF-HoCo. “That is the definition of a systemic problem.”