L.A. watchdog blasts sheriff’s unit that stopped innocent Latinos

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County’s inspector general said Thursday that a Sheriff’s Department team that pulled over thousands of innocent Latino motorists on the 5 Freeway in search of drugs violated the constitutional rights of drivers and he questioned the reason for the unit’s existence.

In a damning verbal report to the department’s civilian oversight panel, Max Huntsman said “the initial premise of this drug enforcement team was flawed” and that the unit has lacked adequate supervision.

Sheriff’s officials failed to take heed of several federal court rulings that found the deputies on the team violated the rights of motorists by detaining them longer than was reasonable, he said.

“The system is inherently built to violate the constitutional rights of a vast number of people passing through the I-5 Freeway,” Huntsman said. “That’s a problem.”

Huntsman began his investigation of the team after a Los Angeles Times analysis last month found that 69 per- cent of drivers stopped by the deputies were Latino and that two-thirds of them had their vehicles searched — a rate far higher than motorists of other racial and ethnic groups. Cars belonging to all other drivers were searched less than half the time, according to the newspaper’s analysis of Sheriff ’s Department stop data.

Deputies found drugs or other illegal items in the vehicles of Latino motorists at a rate that was not significantly higher than that of black or white drivers, the Times found.

Some Latino drivers pulled over by the team have said they believe they were the victims of racial profiling.

Huntsman said his staff recently conducted ride-alongs with the team’s deputies and saw no signs they were using race or other biased factors when deciding whom to stop or search. Huntsman is still gathering data on the team’s traffic stops that he plans to analyze for evidence of racial disparities.

But Huntsman, who is in the early stages of his investigation, said some facts had already become clear. He noted only a small fraction of the more than 9,000 people who were stopped by the team faced criminal charges, adding that some portion of those drivers were “subjected to unlawful detentions.”

“That’s the obvious and inevitable result of a process where you have deputies who simply stop people on a pretext and then try to develop probable cause” to search for drugs, he told members of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission.