North Carolina lawmakers have quietly wiped a nearly three-decade-old transparency tool off the books, scrapping a law that required officers to log details on traffic stops, searches, arrests and uses of force. With a few lines of budget language, the state erased its main public dataset for tracking racial disparities on the road, leaving researchers, local officials and civil-rights advocates trying to assess just how much oversight capacity has vanished.
How The Repeal Was Tucked Into The Budget
As reported by The News & Observer, the General Assembly killed the reporting requirement with a two-line provision buried on page 448 of a 638-page spending bill. The broader budget became law and took effect on July 1, 2026, the start of the new fiscal year, according to the state’s enacted budget. The brief repeal language includes no blueprint for a replacement system, and lawmakers did not hold a separate hearing devoted to ending the long-standing reporting mandate.
The Nearly 30-Year Program
The now-repealed reporting rule traces back to legislation passed in April 1999, which took effect on January 1, 2000. According to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, the General Assembly later expanded the requirement so that, by January 1, 2002, it covered all 100 county sheriffs’ offices and nearly every municipal police department. The SBI ran a public portal that posted monthly counts of stops, searches and enforcement actions, along with the officer-perceived race and ethnicity of each driver.
Why Researchers And Advocates Relied On The Data
Academics and journalists dug into the SBI files, a dataset of more than 20 million stops, to chart disparities across agencies and over time. Duke University’s traffic-stops project cataloged the statewide data and its many uses, and in a 2018 book, Frank Baumgartner and co-authors drew on that record to show that Black drivers were about twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over and more likely to be searched. Their findings fed into policy changes in certain departments and helped shape court filings and broader reform debates.
Officer-Level Red Flags And The Push To Repeal
The state-level reporting made it possible to spot outliers at the individual officer level. Affidavits and local reporting flagged, for instance, a Triangle-area deputy who disproportionately pulled over and searched Hispanic drivers in a county where Hispanics made up less than 10 percent of the population, as well as another officer who searched 49 percent of the drivers he stopped, nearly 96 percent of whom were Black. As reported by The News & Observer, the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association backed the budget change and its leaders said they had requested the repeal. Investigators and civil-rights attorneys counter that losing the statewide feed strips away a key way to spot biased policing, and they point to these concrete examples as proof that the data once had real bite.
What This Means For Oversight
With the centralized, standardized feed shut off, watchdogs, researchers and defense lawyers will have to lean on archived downloads and scattered local reports to compare practices across departments. Supporters of the repeal argued that the statewide mandate created an administrative burden for smaller agencies. Critics respond that the public value of reliable, comparable data outweighs those costs. Individual departments can still publish their own stop statistics, but advocates warn that voluntary disclosures are unlikely to match the consistency and comparability that came from a single statewide system.
What's Next
The repeal sets up an immediate policy and political clash. Some lawmakers and civil-rights organizations have signaled they will try to restore the reporting rule in the next legislative session, while law-enforcement groups may promote other forms of accountability in its place. For now, researchers plan to keep working with archived state records and to watch closely which counties and cities, if any, choose to maintain public stop data on their own.
