Texas law enforcement agencies along Interstate 35 between Dallas and Austin say they are striking contraband gold. A Houston Chronicle analysis found several departments reporting finds in roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the vehicle searches they logged over five years. That cluster of sky-high numbers on the I-35 corridor has academics and civil liberties advocates openly questioning whether something is off, either on the highway or in the paperwork.
Chronicle analysis and state data
The findings come from an exclusive Houston Chronicle examination of five years of traffic stop and search reports that agencies submit to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. According to the Houston Chronicle, agencies including the Mansfield Police Department, the Hays and Bexar County sheriffs' offices, and Cedar Park police logged contraband find rates far above those reported by big city departments. The raw records are drawn from TCOLE annual racial profiling filings, which the agency began publishing in 2020.
Experts and agencies respond
Criminologists who reviewed the numbers told the paper the figures are "astonishing" and likely signal reporting problems rather than a sudden, national-level leap in police accuracy. "I have not seen that in my entire career," Tarleton State's Alex Del Carmen told the paper, and University of Kansas professor Charles Epp said, "It seems impossible that officers are so good at identifying who to search," according to the Houston Chronicle.
The analysis also flags troubling patterns: Bexar County deputies reported finding contraband in about 70% of searches but arrested drivers only about 10% of the time, Mansfield reported roughly a 75% hit rate, and Travis County reported a 55% find rate with no arrests in some years. Agencies with unusually high search volumes often reported higher find rates when encountering Black drivers than white drivers.
National research shows stops usually come up empty
National research paints a much more modest picture. Large, multi-city analyses find contraband in roughly one-third of searches, and only a small share of those encounters lead to arrests that hold up. The book "Suspect Citizens" and its underlying dataset examined millions of stops and found searches seldom produce arrestable offenses, a pattern that undercuts the idea that extraordinarily high hit rates simply reflect superior targeting. Suspect Citizens reports that, overall, searches produced contraband in about a third of cases and led to arrest far less often.
State oversight and fixes in motion
Texas regulators have acknowledged the limits of self-reported figures and are moving to tighten definitions and validation for stop and search reporting. TCOLE maintains the annual reporting portal and has begun convening advisory workgroups to standardize how agencies log stops, searches, and contraband. Public meeting notices also list "Motor Vehicle Stop Data" on the commission agenda. The goal is clearer vendor validation and definitions so outlier tallies can be spotted and corrected before publication.
Why it matters locally
How agencies count and report contraband matters because these numbers shape public policy, oversight, and trust in policing. When searches regularly turn up only minor paraphernalia or small amounts of marijuana and almost no arrests, they raise civil liberty and equity questions. Courts have previously ruled that sweeping stop-and-frisk programs can violate constitutional protections, and the debate in Texas now centers on whether high hit rates reflect policing success or inconsistent reporting that obscures how often drivers, disproportionately Black drivers in some places, are subjected to searches. See the federal opinion on Justia for an earlier legal ruling in Floyd v. City of New York on the limits of stop and frisk.
