TYLER, Texas — Racial tension is high across the United States and in Tyler. Protesters have gathered for the last 11 days to peacefully advocate for the end of racial discrimination and changes to law enforcement.
It seems, the Tyler Police Department is listening to the community. Police Chief Jimmy Toler announced Tuesday the department will be updating its use of force guidelines by Friday.
The announcement came after the public asked for the release of TPD’s policies and reports at a Black Lives Matter town hall meeting held last week.
During a City Council meeting Wednesday, City Manager Ed Broussard told the mayor and council members that information was now posted to the website.
Under the resources tab on the police department’s page, there are two tabs for policies and reports. The policy page has a list of policies ranging from management principals, organization function, discrimination, pursuit policy and more.
As for reports, TPD’s annual documents have not been posted yet. However, the last five years of racial profiling reports can be seen.
Looking back at 2017, there was about 26,000 cars pulled over and of those the majority were white.
For 2018, there were around 43,000 drivers stopped, and again the majority were white. There was also one incident where physical force was used and resulted in a bodily injury, but it does not mention the type of injury, gender or race.
In 2019, there were about 35,500 stops.
Of that, 55% were white, roughly 26% were black and nearly 18% were Hispanic or Latino. The number of incidents where physical force was used and caused bodily harm went up by 10 from the year before to a total of 11.
To put this in perspective, the City of Tyler was estimated to have a population around 107,000 people as of July 2019, according to the Census Bureau.
With 68% of residents being white, 25% black, 22% Hispanic or Latino and less than 2% Asian. This means there's about 27,000 people living in Tyler who are black and that around 34% of Tyler's black community could have been pulled over by TPD in 2019.