LA County sheriff launches review on stops for innocent Latino drivers
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell has launched a pair of internal reviews into a team of deputies who have pulled over thousands of innocent Latino drivers on the 5 Freeway in a search for drugs.
Sheriff’s officials told the department’s civilian oversight commission Thursday that auditors were examining data on the traffic stops and the department’s constitutional policing adviser is reviewing the team’s practices amid allegations that deputies engaged in racial profiling along the highway.
The announcement came as commission members questioned department brass about the team’s work and a Los Angeles Times investigation that found the deputies stopped and searched the vehicles of Latino drivers at far higher rates than motorists of other racial or ethnic groups.
Chief John Benedict and Capt. Robert Lewis, who oversee the Domestic Highway Enforcement Team, denied that deputies target Latino drivers as they make stops along a rural, 40-mile stretch of the freeway near Santa Clarita.
Commissioner Lael Rubin, a former supervisor in the district attorney’s office, asked whether the board would be able to review data the department collects on the team’s traffic stops. Benedict responded by highlighting the two ongoing inquiries, which are in addition to an independent review being done by Max Huntsman, the county’s inspector general. Huntsman told commissioners he would provide them the department’s traffic stop data.
In a brief interview afterward, Benedict said McDonnell had ordered the parallel reviews, but did not give details on the scope or time frame of the work that the auditors and adviser will undertake.
Huntsman told the commission that he, too, was unable to say when his inquiry would be complete and agreed to update the board on his progress at its next meeting. He applauded the department’s decision to conduct its own audit, but said sheriff’s officials should have been analyzing the team’s stops before the Times did.
“The most troubling thing about what happened in the Times was it was news — that we didn’t know it already, that the department wasn’t already crunching these numbers,” Huntsman said.
A Times analysis of more than 9,000 stops found that 69 percent of drivers stopped by the highway team from its start in 2012 through the end of last year were Latino and that two-thirds of them had their vehicles searched — a rate far higher than motorists of other racial and ethnic groups.