Big disparities in police stops
Black drivers in wealthiest enclaves much more likely to be pulled over
Despite large police departments across California ramping up their efforts to stamp out racial profiling, those initiatives have done little — if anything — to close the vast gap between Black and white people who are stopped and searched by officers.
Data reported by smaller law enforcement agencies, released for the first time, showed the problem is even worse in some wealthy enclaves, like Piedmont and Los Altos, that recorded higher disparities than larger, spotlight-grabbing cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Disparities in the number of Black and white Californians stopped by police remained virtually unchanged among 17 of the state’s biggest law enforcement agencies from 2020 to 2021, according to a Chronicle analysis drawing from data the agencies are now required to collect.
The data, released last week by the state attorney general, reveals that Black drivers and pedestrians are far more likely to be stopped and searched than white people in nearly every part of the state, despite being less likely to be found carrying contraband, such as illegal guns or drugs, when stopped.
In San Francisco and Los Angeles, Black people were at least five times as likely to be stopped by police than white residents in 2021, when factoring in the relative city populations of the racial groups. In Oakland, Black people were six times as likely to be stopped.
The racial profiling data The Chronicle analyzed also includes, for the first time, stats about police stops among 41 smaller law enforcement agencies.
That data shows that some of the Bay Area’s wealthiest midsize communities had the starkest racial disparities. In Los Altos and Belmont, two Silicon Valley suburbs, Black people were nine and 10 times as likely to be stopped by police, respectively, than white residents in
2021, relative to their share of the population.
In Berkeley and Petaluma, Black people were seven and five times as likely, respectively, to be stopped.
But the starkest racial disparity in the state was in Piedmont, the predominantly white and wealthy neighbor to Oakland. Black residents are 1% of Piedmont’s population and accounted for 29% of all police stops, meaning they were nearly 50 times as likely to be stopped relative to their share of the population as white people. White people are about 62% of the population but only accounted for 34% of stops.
Piedmont Police Chief Jeremy Bowers, who is Black, said comparing police stop data to the city’s racial makeup in the U.S. Census “is inappropriate and flawed.” He said the city also polices people who pass through the community but live elsewhere.
“Piedmont does not exist in a bubble,” he said. “Piedmont exists within a major metropolitan area, which is one of the most diverse in the country.”
Bowers also stressed that Piedmont began reporting data to the state months earlier than required under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, known as RIPA, to help provide accountability to the community. He said the city takes “matters of equity very seriously” and has initiatives to promote diverse hiring and training to combat officers’ unconscious biases, training that the state already requires.
Criminal justice reform advocates say the vast, enduring racial disparities speak both to the deeply rooted nature of racial bias and the need for more aggressive reforms that limit when officers can arbitrarily stop people.
“It tells us that, to truly move towards greater racial equity, we must take a transformative approach,” said Chauncee Smith, senior manager of the Reimagine Justice and Safety program at Catalyst California, a racial justice-oriented nonprofit. “Rather than continuing to tinker around the edges with very minor piecemeal policy changes, we have to reclaim community safety by no longer relying on law enforcement to be a solution to every social problem.”
Smith’s organization recently published a report showing that in 2019, officers from California’s four largest sheriff’s departments spent the majority of their time initiating traffic stops for minor violations, i.e., pretextual stops, rather than responding to civilian calls for help.
At the same time, the report noted, indicators of traffic safety, such as fatal car crashes, have not improved.
“The whole idea … that these stops are supposed to make the streets safer is falling short,” Smith said. “It brings into question the actual purpose of these practices.”
This year, the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act Advisory Board, concluded in its annual report that California legislators should consider banning certain types of minor or technical traffic stops altogether to prevent bias.
They recommended stopping officers from making pretextual stops, instances when an officer stops a driver for a minor traffic violation, like a broken tail light, expired registration or tinted windows, and uses the stop as an excuse to investigate the driver for a more serious offense.
Steven Raphael, co-chair of the RIPA board for its 2023 report and a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said the recommendation came after data showed, year after year, that racial disparities are “stubborn” and not improving. He said the hope is that police will use traffic stops as an investigatory tool less often and instead focus on stopping people whose driving poses a public-safety risk.
“The patterns are pretty clear from year to year,” Raphael said. “That recommendation is trying to sort of move the state in that direction. Hopefully there will be some movement.”
An effort to ban many types of pretextual stops fizzled in the state Legislature last year amid heavy opposition from powerful law enforcement associations. But the effort has been revived and could fare better as a large class of freshmen Democratic legislators weigh the issue.
For instance, Smith’s organization is drumming up support for SB50, a bill introduced by state Sen. Steven Bradford, DGardena (Los Angeles County), that would limit officers’ ability to conduct pretextual stops. Smith said the bill would also allow local governments to “explore non-law enforcement approaches to traffic safety,” such as by giving a local transportation department authority to conduct traffic stops instead of police.
Bradford is still working out the bill’s final language. But he said it will be similar to last year’s unsuccessful measure, which would have prohibited officers from stopping motorists solely for certain low-level infractions.
The senator said the latest RIPA data only emboldens the argument for his bill. “I’m a firm believer that the proof is in the pudding. We need an evolution in law enforcement,” he said.
Police aren’t just more likely to stop Black people in California. They’re also far more likely to search them once they stop them, according to the data. In fact, officers conducted more searches of Black people overall than of white people in 2021, despite the fact that the state has more than six times as many non-Hispanic white people as Black.
But when officers do search Black people, they are less likely to find contraband on them than in their searches of white people, including illegal guns, drugs and other prohibited items, the data shows. Across the state, police found contraband in about 33% of searches involving non-Hispanic Black people, but 35% of searches involving non-Hispanic whites.
California’s renewed effort to collect “stop data” began in 2015, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the landmark Racial and Identity Profiling Act. The law requires police departments to report the demographic data — including race and ethnicity, gender and approximate age — of every driver, bicyclist or pedestrian they stop, based on the officer’s perception of those characteristics.
The data includes all people stopped by police, regardless of whether the officers were responding to a potential offense they observed or to a call for service.
Law enforcement agencies with 1,000 or more officers were required to report data to the state starting with 2018. The reporting requirement has gradually expanded to smaller agencies: this year, agencies with 334 or more officers were required to report data for 2021.
The reporting requirement expands to all police agencies for data collected in 2022, which won’t be released until next year.
But the accuracy of the data about racial profiling has routinely been questioned by groups representing law enforcement, such as the Peace Officers Research Association of California, or PORAC; the California Police Chiefs Association and the California State Sheriffs’ Association. The RIPA board does include representatives from PORAC and the police chiefs association.
PORAC, which represents most of the state’s full-time law enforcement officers, says the data is flawed for a host of reasons. The group argues that because an officer’s perception of someone’s race is collected after a traffic stop, it’s unclear whether the officer knew their race before pulling them over.
“Racial profiling exists and must be addressed,” Brian Marvel, PORAC’s president and a San Diego police officer, said in a statement. “A data driven approach to doing so is certainly needed and that is why it is so important that the state collect this data in a manner that captures the nuances of police work accurately.”
Marvel said traffic stops are an important policing tool and crucial to keeping pedestrians and motorists safe.
“Traffic stops are where officers discover illegal guns, drugs laced with fentanyl and give officers the opportunity to prevent crimes before they occur or stop crimes as they are occurring,” he said.
Raphael, co-chair of the RIPA Board last year, said while the data can have flaws, it mirrors racial profiling disparities across the country, as well as trends documented by police departments using their own methodology.
“What’s being documented in the data looks pretty similar to what’s being documented in other places,” he said. “Overall, there’s a lot to be learned from RIPA, even if it’s not the perfect data set.”