ANOTHER STUDY FOR SDPD TO TAKE SERIOUSLY

Issues of racial justice took center stage last week as Americans again heard George Floyd’s name invoked with grim, daily regularity during the trial of the Minneapolis officer charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death last year.

It’s part of a larger problem that too many people are referring to the proceeding as the George Floyd trial, not the Derek Chauvin trial, though. Floyd isn’t on trial. The officer who killed him is, and the details that emerged during an emotional first week of testimony were troubling — because of what happened that fateful day in May and because of what the killing suggests about how some law enforcement officers look at everyday Americans, especially those of color, especially Black Americans.

Locally, the San Diego Police Department has some reflection of its own to do in the wake of a damning analysis of the racial breakdown of traffic and pedestrian stops. Lyndsay Winkley and Lauryn Schroeder of The San Diego Union-tribune published their investigation into nearly 500,000 stops by the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego County Sheriff ’s Department the day before Chauvin’s trial began. It’s just the latest study to show that Black people — and, to varying degrees, other people of color — are stopped, searched and arrested at higher rates than White people. The journalists report that Black people across California were stopped at more than twice their share of the population in 2019, according to state data.

They also found that Black San Diegans make up 6 percent of the city’s population yet accounted for nearly 20 percent of the traffic stops by San Diego police between July 2018 and December 2020. And that SDPD was also more likely to use force on minority groups, including Black and Latino people, than on White residents, and sheriff ’s deputies were more likely to use force on Native Americans.

To his credit, San Diego police Capt. Jeffrey Jordan acknowledged that officer bias does partly contribute to policing disparities. He also said the racial discrepancies result from factors outside the officers’ control — factors like homelessness, mental illness and criminal activity. That may be so, but the disproportionate data points are significant and scary and must be viewed seriously by the officers in the field and the managers overseeing them.

SDPD should be re-examining consent searches, pretext stops and other ways that police can ensure their stops aren’t disproportionately affecting communities of color. Another area of policing that needs attention is the racial makeup of the law enforcement staffs themselves. SDPD is 59 percent White and the Sheriff ’s department is 54 percent White while the city’s population is less than 43 percent White and the county’s 45.6 percent White.

Community trust is crucial. The county’s two largest law enforcement agencies, especially the San Diego Police Department, have stacks of evidence showing them they’re doing something wrong. Community activists aren’t going away, and neither will the need to investigate racial bias within law enforcement — unless the authorities start seriously looking at the data, listening to the people pointing out the problem and start trying to solve it.