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For nearly three decades, North Carolina required law enforcement officers and agencies to record information about traffic stops, searches, arrests and uses of force, creating a database that allowed the public to examine racial disparities involving individual officers and departments.
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That requirement ended July 1, when the General Assembly quietly repealed it through a two-line provision on page 448 of the newly passed 634-page state budget.
Some law enforcement leaders welcomed the end of what they considered redundant and flawed paperwork.
But researchers and civil rights advocates say the repeal eliminates one of the state’s strongest tools for identifying patterns of biased policing.
Others, including Rep. Marcia Morey, a Durham Democrat, didn’t know it had been eliminated.
“We keep finding little gems that pop up,” Morey said sarcastically in an interview with The News & Observer.
A spokesperson for Gov. Josh Stein said removing the reporting requirements undermines the trust law enforcement officers have worked to build in their communities.
“Greater transparency leads to greater accountability. This criminal justice data helps our law enforcement agencies better serve their people and makes North Carolina safer and stronger,” the spokesperson said.
Republican Senate leader Phil Berger told The News & Observer that the change was requested by law enforcement officials who said they weren’t using the information.
Two statewide law enforcement groups confirmed they supported the repeal. Lauren Tally Earnhardt, executive vice president of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, said her organization requested it. The North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police also supported the change, said its legislative counsel Fred Baggett.
“We’re glad it’s gone. We’ve been working on getting rid of it for a very long time,” said longtime Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood.
Republican legislative leaders did not respond to emails asking why the repeal was included in the budget, what will happen to previously collected information or how the state will monitor disparities without the data.
The law, which first passed in 1999, required state law enforcement officers to collect information about the age and race of the person stopped, among other data, starting Jan. 1, 2000.
The General Assembly later expanded the law to include all law enforcement agencies in cities or towns with a population of more than 10,000 and sheriff’s offices. North Carolina was the first in the nation to start collecting the data.
Blackwood said the reporting system was poorly designed from the beginning, with no guidelines, little training and no oversight to ensure agencies collected and submitted the information consistently. That left agencies to interpret the requirements differently and produce incomplete and unreliable data.
Under those circumstances, officers could spend up to 15 minutes per stop writing down all the information, in addition to the standard report they had to fill out.
The related paperwork had a “chilling effect” on deputies, Blackwood said, making them more reluctant to stop someone because they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork.
Blackwood said his office has systems in place that allow deputies to use tools like footage from body-worn and vehicle cameras to address poor policing practices. A key part of that process is listening to public complaints and using those tools to evaluate concerns, he said.
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Civil rights attorney Ian Mance disagrees with Blackwell’s assessment that the reporting system is unreliable. He said each law enforcement agency has been responsible for ensuring the information it submitted was complete and accurate.
For more than a decade, Mance has used those records to identify patterns within law enforcement agencies and among individual officers and has watched as cities, including Durham, Chapel Hill and Asheville, use the information to improve policing practices.
In 2015, while working at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Mance launched and managed the organization’s Open Data Policing initiative, which allows users to search for patterns involving law-enforcement agencies and, in many cases, individual officers.
Mance, who went on to work for civil rights organization Emancipate NC, has taught continuing legal education seminars to state and federal attorneys across the country. In 2015, he demonstrated at the White House how the data could be used.
Defense attorneys have hired him as an expert witness to analyze the records of officers who arrested their clients, which has resulted in defendants having their charges dismissed or reduced due to concerns about officers’ policing disparate patterns.
In one case, Mance identified a Triangle-area deputy who, over two years, overwhelmingly stopped and searched Hispanic drivers in a county where Hispanic residents made up less than 10% of the population, according to an affidavit Mance prepared.
In another case in a Western North Carolina city, Mance found that an officer searched 49% of the drivers he stopped between 2016 and 2021 — 16 times more than the statewide average search rate for officers. Nearly 96% of his searches were of Black drivers, Mance said in an affidavit for the case.
The new change makes policing more opaque and reduces the opportunity to identify problematic behavior, Mance said.
“This will really hinder the ability of attorneys moving forward to do what we’ve been doing over the past dozen years in terms of introducing statistical, reliable statistical evidence of racially disparate enforcement,” Mance said. “It’s nearly impossible to demonstrate to a court if you don’t have the benefit of the statistics.”
U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, a Guilford County Democrat, served in the North Carolina House of Representatives when the law was discussed and passed in 1999. Adams expressed concern not only about the repeal of the law, but also about the way the change was tucked into the budget bill.
“Why was it secretly done?” she said, adding that she called some of her North Carolina colleagues who weren’t aware of the change.
“I just think that we need to have more transparency, not less, and this was an opportunity to have data recorded, documented,” she said.
Henry King, deputy chief of police at Winston-Salem State University and a former Edenton police chief, said forward-thinking departments will continue collecting the data to determine whether enforcement patterns reveal racial disparities or refute allegations of profiling. The information allows police leaders to look beyond who is stopped and examine who receives citations, is searched or faces other enforcement actions.
Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who used the numbers for studies and a book in 2018, said he is surprised that the law was repealed without notice or an explanation.
“I think that putting your head in the sand is a really bad way of dealing with potential public policy problems, and eliminating the data makes it hard to document whether or not there’s a problem,” Baumgartner told The News & Observer.
His book documented an approximately two-to-one greater likelihood that Black drivers would be pulled over. Once they were pulled over, Black drivers were approximately twice as likely to be searched, he said.
“It’s not racially equitable. There’s evidence of very great and substantial and consistent and ubiquitous problems; like every department that we’ve looked at always has a problem. So it’s troubling that they would stop,” he said.
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Staff reporter Ronni Butts contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 28, 2026 at 5:11 PM.