Study: Citations hit certain minorities hardest
New report highlights huge racial inequity of police giving summons
Black and Latino residents in California are much more likely to be cited by police for minor offenses than White residents — a disparity that’s particularly egregious in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco, according to a new report.
Last year, police in California issued more than 250,000 citations for things like loitering, jaywalking and owning a dog without a license, according to data released Wednesday by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Those citations on their own don’t lead to jail time, but they often result in fines that can prove a major hardship for low-income residents. And the burden falls disproportionally on two overlapping groups — people of color and homeless residents.
“Our data show that nontraffic infractions are being used to police and criminalize the everyday behavior of Black and Latinx Californians,” said Tori Larson, an Equal Justice Works Fellow with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights — an organization of civil rights attorneys founded in 1968. “And the consequences of these infractions have an incredible impact on the individuals who receive them.”
Tom Saggau, spokesman for the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, insisted officers do not discriminate.
“When it comes to enforcing the law, we focus on behavior — not color, not race, not creed, not religion and not sexual orientation,” he wrote in an email. “Police don’t create the laws, and if these attorneys don’t want quality- of-life crimes enforced, they should talk to legislators.”
The report comes as cities throughout the Bay Area and the rest of the state are grappling with calls to “defund the police” and reinvest money in community programs. Bay Area activists long have argued that unhoused residents seem unable to escape racking up minor citations. When they can’t pay the associated fines, or have no way to get to court to contest the citation, the bills multiply — sinking them in debt, derailing their efforts to secure housing and, in some California counties, even landing them in jail.
“Unsurprisingly, citations and arrests have not improved homelessness,” said Tifanei ResslMoyer, a Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Fellow with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
The Lawyers’ Committee collected data from multiple places in an attempt to gather a complete picture, including two California Department of Justice databases, the state Judicial Council and individual public records requests made to law enforcement agencies.
In Oakland, Black residents were nearly 10 times more likely to be cited than White residents in 2018 and 2019, according to
data collected under the state’s new Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which is tasked with eliminating racial profiling. Latino residents were nearly six times more likely. Of the state’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies, Oakland had the worst racial discrepancies, according to the report.
In San Jose, Black residents were nearly seven times more likely to be cited than White residents, and Latino residents were twice as likely. In San Francisco, Black residents were 4.5 times as likely to be cited, and Latino residents were just as likely to be cited as White residents.
Representatives from the San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland police departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There was no comprehensive data available regarding the impact of those citations on homeless residents, as law enforcement agencies do
not always record whether the person cited has housing. But the majority of citations police handed out were for infractions such as sitting, sleeping or loitering in a public place, or curfew violations — behaviors homeless residents often are penalized for.
Out of the nearly 29,000 total citations the researchers obtained data for through public records requests, almost 11,000 were for behaviors the researchers called “existence in public space.”
“Anecdotally, based on our practice in San Francisco and the Bay Area, we know that the majority of these infractions are being enforced against people who are unhoused,” Larson said.
But the power to change that dynamic lies in the hands of legislators, Saggau said.
“Not providing adequate mental health services or housing the homeless contributes to many of these infractions,” he wrote in an email. “Instead of blaming law enforcement, the focus should be on policymakers to find solutions to these
pressing needs.”
The researchers trace the practice of citing unhoused people back to “Ugly Laws” that began cropping up in the 19th century as a way to police people and behavior deemed “ugly” — including in the Bay Area. They cite an ordinance passed in San Francisco in 1867 that banned “street begging” and prohibited “certain persons” from appearing in public places.
The researchers recommended several changes to address the inequities they found. For example, state and city officials could pass laws stopping the enforcement of minor infractions, they said.
“Criminal enforcement is not the right way,” said Elisa Della-Piana, legal director of the Lawyers’ Committee, “and the function of it right now in our society is to police the bodies of Black, Latinx and unhoused people because police have decided that they shouldn’t be in public space. And we have to stop that.”