Chittenden County State's Attorney Sarah George is asking voters for a third term in an August 11 Democratic primary, with no Republican in the race to follow. Her challenger, Franklin County State's Attorney Bram Kranichfeld, has said that if elected he would prosecute serious crimes discovered from traffic stops — a direct reference to a policy George put in place in January 2022, when her office stopped prosecuting cases arising from "non-public-safety traffic stops": violations such as broken taillights, expired inspection stickers and suspended registrations. Speeding, reckless driving and suspected impaired driving remained outside the policy.

George said lower-level stops increased racial bias in the criminal justice system without improving public safety. Her decision relied heavily on a 2017 University of Vermont study, "Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont," by economist Stephanie Seguino and Cornell University professor Nancy Brooks.

The study found Black drivers in Vermont were searched at roughly four times the rate of white drivers. Vermont State Police said troopers would continue enforcing state law as written. Police chiefs in Hinesburg and Barre defended non-moving violations as legitimate enforcement tools, and one State Police sergeant noted that officers often encounter impaired drivers through stops for other violations.

What the Study Found

Seguino and Brooks used Vermont DMV accident data as a proxy for the racial makeup of drivers on Vermont roads, rather than comparing stops to town census populations. They also examined "hit rates" — how often a search produced contraband or a citation.

Statewide, searches of white drivers produced contraband or cause for citation about 67% of the time, versus about 56% for Black and Hispanic drivers. Later Vermont State Police data showed a narrower gap: 76.4% versus 71.4%.

The study's authors were explicit about a limitation: the available data did not permit "a deeper investigation into the causes of these disparities." The research documented a pattern. It did not establish what produced it.

Where Vermont's Data Stops Short

A 2014 state law required agencies to collect traffic-stop data, but searches are logged under only a handful of categories: no search, probable cause, reasonable suspicion or warrant. The data doesn't distinguish a search based on plain view, a K-9 alert, an informant tip or an ongoing investigation from one based on an officer's on-the-spot judgment call. Consent searches aren't broken out as their own category either. A March 2025 report to Vermont lawmakers acknowledged that analysts were working with public files lacking more granular, de-identified detail, warning the records "may not reflect the full picture."

Search law also shifted mid-period: in State v. Zullo (2019), the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the smell of marijuana alone no longer establishes probable cause, since possession had become partly legal. No public analysis appears to show how that ruling affected search rates, let alone whether the effect differed by race.

The Interstate 91 Question

Vermont sits at the end of a documented drug-trafficking corridor running north on I-91 from Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. A 2024 Brandeis University analysis found heroin selling for $4–$6 in Springfield could fetch $20–$30 after reaching Vermont — an incentive that shows up repeatedly in Vermont drug cases involving out-of-state vehicles and suspects. Some of those cases have turned violent: a 17-year-old from Springfield was shot and killed in Danby in February 2022 in a case investigators linked to trafficking and stolen firearms; a Brooklyn man was killed in a Rutland drive-by the same year over drug territory; two Massachusetts men were killed in a Lowell case reported as trafficking-related in 2023.

The corridor itself is well documented. Its relationship to Vermont's racial traffic-stop statistics is not. No public data currently shows whether out-of-state vehicles are searched at different rates, whether rates vary by highway, or whether disparities cluster along known trafficking routes — the state's public files aren't granular enough to test it.

Where the Campaign Stands

The traffic-stop policy is now part of a live campaign argument. Kranichfeld has made reversing it a specific day-one commitment, framing it alongside his pledge to roll back George's limits on requesting cash bail, and has argued more broadly that Chittenden County residents have lost confidence that police involvement leads to any consequence. George has defended her record as reform that reduced the county's court backlog and improved relations with police, and has said voters who blame her office for local crime trends should look at the underlying data rather than assumptions. A June 2026 poll commissioned by Campaign for Vermont found registered voters in the county favor prosecutors emphasizing accountability over discretion by a wide margin, though George holds a substantial lead over Kranichfeld among the Democratic primary electorate that will decide the race.

Neither candidate has publicly addressed the specific evidentiary gap at the center of the original policy: the Seguino and Brooks study never established what caused the racial disparity it documented, and Vermont's search-category data still can't test competing explanations such as the state's role in the Interstate 91 drug corridor. Nor has either campaign, or the state, produced a public accounting of how many cases have been declined under the policy since 2022, what the underlying stops turned up, or whether crash rates, impaired-driving arrests or other safety measures moved as a result.

Voters deciding the county's top prosecutor seat on August 11 are being asked to judge close to five years of a policy whose stated justification was never proven and whose actual results were never measured.