Community Advisory Team and Traffic Citation Analysis

The Community Advisory Team will assist the Alexandria Police Department in ongoing efforts to strengthen its connection with the community.
Page updated on December 11, 2023 at 8:47 AM
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The Alexandria Police Department (APD) formed a Community Advisory Team to assist the Department in considering and implementing relevant recommendations from the final report of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The report, issued in 2015, identified ways that policing practices can promote effective crime reduction while building public trust. The Community Advisory Team, which includes community leaders appointed by the Police Chief, will serve as a key partner in APD's ongoing efforts to strengthen its connection to the communities it serves. 

The contents of the 21st Century Policing report and its recommendations have been reviewed by APD and this plan reflects the efforts of the department to promote positive relationships between the Department and the community it serves.  This plan is intended to offer some insight into APD’s continuing efforts to be professional, relevant, and maintain effective relationships with all residents within the community it serves.

Community Advisory Team Members

  • Pete Benavage, Seminary West Civic Association
  • Bill Blackburn, Del Ray Business Association
  • Roy Byrd, Federation of Civic Associations
  • Yvonne Weight Callahan, Old Town Civic Association
  • Dr. Julie Crawford, Chief of Student Services, Alexandria City Public Schools
  • Besu Feleke, Ethiopian Community
  • Dak Hardwick, Alexandria Chamber of Commerce
  • Christopher Harris, Alexandria Branch NAACP
  • Judge Howard Woodson, Resident/Attorney at Law
  • Anwar Khan, Islamic Relief USA
  • Dr. Jim McClellan, NOVA - Alexandria Campus
  • Dawnielle Miller, Executive Director, Casa Chirilagua
  • Igris Moran, Tenants and Workers United
  • Alexis Stackhouse, The Litigation Practice of Alexandria

The Community Advisory Team, which held its first meeting on May 31, 2017,  is beginning its work by reviewing an independent analysis of the racial and ethnic distribution of APD traffic citation data from 2011 through 2015.

Community Advisory Team Minutes

Traffic Citation Analysis Report

The following report is a basic analysis of the Alexandria Police Department's traffic citation data for the years 2011 to 2015. The analysis, requested by APD in August 2016 and conducted by the George Mason University Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, included 85,900 citations issued during 75,769 traffic stops.

The authors of the traffic citation analysis explained that direct comparisons between traffic stops and community demographics are not sufficient to draw conclusions.  They recommended that "more in-depth research needs to be conducted using a variety of benchmarking, evaluation, and observational techniques to better understand racial and ethnic disparities that tend to exist in traffic stop data in jurisdictions." The authors noted that "disparities across racial and ethnic groups with regard to traffic citations may be the result of actual rates of offending across different population groups, the decisions officers make about where and when to conduct traffic enforcement, or implicit or explicit biases of officers. This could not be discerned here."