The Florida Highway Patrol searches Black drivers at more than three times the rate of White drivers, and it finds illegal drugs and weapons less often, according to a TCPalm analysis of over 1 million FHP traffic stops from 2024-25.
Rates vary by county, with the disparity reaching as high as eight times in one Florida county.
A county-by-county breakdown reveals stark geographic variation in how troopers treat Black drivers — disparities that civil rights and policing researchers say are among the strongest indicators of racial bias in a law enforcement agency.
FHP searches Black drivers more in these counties
In Manatee County, Black drivers were searched in 2% of traffic stops, compared to 0.24% for White drivers — making Black drivers eight times more likely to be searched. That translates to FHP stopping 1,331 Black drivers and searching 26, compared to stopping 5,444 White drivers and searching 13.
Troopers in St. Johns, Columbia and Hillsborough counties searched Black drivers at least seven times more often than White drivers.
In all, 25 counties showed Black drivers being searched at more than twice the rate of White drivers.
In some rural counties, the numbers are based on only a handful of searches, making them harder to interpret statistically. But in heavily populated counties with thousands of stops, the disparities remain consistent.
Columbia County showed the highest raw disparity regardless of stop totals — 149 Black driver searches compared to 36 for White drivers. The county is 17% Black and 77% White, U.S. Census Bureau data show.
Orange County recorded the most Black driver searches in the state with 180, including Charlie Ray Mayhue, who told TCPalm FHP has searched him three times without finding any contraband. FHP records show the 24-year-old Orlando resident was stopped for speeding in April 2024, and troopers did not find anything in his vehicle.
“It’s an invasion of privacy,” Mayhue said. “One guy was super determined that I had something in the car.”
What FHP numbers say about potential bias
Researchers who study police behavior say search rates — not stop rates — are the most telling measure of potential racial bias.
“Across the country, the biggest disparities are in who is searched,” said Jack McDevitt, author and former criminology professor at Northeastern University. “Some officers’ perceptions of who commits crimes can be tied to their race and ethnicity.”
A traffic stop can be explained by an observed violation, but a search requires a trooper to make a judgment call about suspicion.
A further indicator of whether those judgment calls are sound: how often searches actually turn up contraband. Statewide, FHP found contraband in roughly half of searches of Black drivers — a lower rate than among White drivers, 58% of whom had contraband when searched.
FHP charges Black drivers more for minor traffic offenses
The disparity extends beyond searches.
In Lafayette County, Black drivers were more than twice as likely as White drivers to be cited for minor, nonmoving traffic violations, such as window tint or equipment violations that give troopers a legal basis to initiate a stop.
Statewide, window tint is the most common reason Black drivers are stopped before a search, FHP records show. Speed is second. Failure to wear a seatbelt is third.
Critics say minor violations are frequently used as “pretextual stops” — legal justifications to stop a driver when the real motivation may be something else.
“There has to be something more than the race of the driver to warrant a stop,” said James V. Cook, a Tallahassee civil rights attorney who pursues cases against law enforcement agencies.
FHP’s racial profiling policy
FHP policy prohibits troopers from making decisions based on race or ethnicity and says it screens for bias throughout its hiring process, including psychological evaluations and polygraph testing.
The agency has faced scrutiny over racial profiling dating to the War on Drugs era of the 1980s, when the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles — which oversees FHP — advised troopers to watch for drivers wearing “lots of gold” or who were members of “ethnic groups associated with the drug trade.”
Amid the backlash, Gov. Jeb Bush directed FHP to begin collecting traffic stop data in 2000.
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A 2021 study by the nonpartisan American Economic Association found 42% of FHP troopers practiced racial discrimination based on factors including a driver’s apparent race and whether they spoke English with an accent.
Note on methodology: The analysis excluded counties with fewer than 10 searches each for Black and White drivers to avoid unreliable outliers from small samples. In Okeechobee County, for example, FHP searched four Black drivers and one White driver — a sample too small to draw meaningful conclusions. That’s a search rate 12 times higher for Black drivers.
Jack Lemnus is a TCPalm enterprise reporter. Contact him at jack.lemnus@tcpalm.com, 772-409-1345, or follow him on X @JackLemnus.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: FHP searches Black drivers in Escambia County 3X more than Whites
Reporting by Jack Lemnus, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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