Police pretext stop bill dies in Legislature

“Research shows that these pretextual stops or stops for minor infractions more generally are costly to communities.” Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board report

In a win for police unions and prosecutors, a bill to eliminate pretext stops — the common police practice of pulling drivers over for minor offenses like broken taillights in order to search their cars for drugs or guns — failed to garner enough votes before the Thursday night deadline and is dead for the year.

SB50 by Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena (Los Angeles County), would have prohibited officers from stopping drivers for a problem with a single headlight or brake light, the lack of a registration tag or front license plate, or defects in bumper equipment.

Police would still be allowed to pull drivers over for two or more such minor offenses under the bill. The restrictions would not have applied to stops of commercial vehicles.

In a draft report released this week, the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board condemned police pretext stops, and presented evidence that they are an ineffective method of policing.

“Research shows that these pretextual stops or stops for minor infractions more generally are costly to communities. A review of RIPA data demonstrated that officers in 2019 spent nearly 80,000 hours on traffic stops that led to no enforcement action — not even writing a ticket or giving a warning,” the report says.

The board had recommended passage of SB50.

The Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to pretext stops in 1996, ruling unanimously in Whren v. U.S. that police can stop a vehicle if they have reason to believe it was violating traffic laws. But states can still restrict or ban the practice under their own laws. And President Joe Biden, in a May 2022 executive order, called on police nationwide to end “discriminatory pretextual stops.”

California’s Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, with four Newsom appointees among its six members, recommended a statewide ban on pretext stops last year, saying the practice particularly harms racial minorities, who are far more likely than whites to be pulled over for traffic offenses.

“Police departments acting in a racially biased manner and wasting their time is not a good way to solve crime,” said the committee’s chairman, Michael Romano, a Stanford law lecturer appointed to the panel by Newsom.

The San Francisco Police Commission reported last October that Black drivers in the city were 10 times as likely as white drivers to be pulled over in a pretext stop, even though officers rarely found criminal evidence in their vehicles. The commission has recommended limiting pretext stops by San Francisco police, a plan that has been scaled back since it was first proposed in May 2022.

Police in Los Angeles announced new restrictions in March 2022, saying officers could stop a vehicle only if they had reason to believe the driver was endangering others or had committed a serious offense. Traffic stops in Los Angeles from March through December 2022 were 20.8% lower than they had been for the same period in 2021, the police department reported.

Bradford, author of SB50, said the measure “will help protect Californians of color from unnecessary harms and help ensure that public dollars dedicated to community safety are used more effectively.”

But the California District Attorneys Association said a ban on stopping drivers for low-level offenses “jeopardizes public safety, undermines the rule of law, and reduces accountability for low level infractions.”

Those stops are “a very effective investigative tool that is often used by law enforcement to gather information needed in an ongoing criminal investigation, apprehend a suspect who is wanted for having committed an unrelated criminal violation, or to investigate an unrelated offense,” the prosecutors’ group told a legislative committee.

Recently in San Diego, the association said, police stopped a driver for having a broken taillight on a boat trailer, searched and found 20,000 fentanyl pills and 1,000 pounds of methamphetamine.

While police and most prosecutors in the state opposed SB50, the bill was supported by the Prosecutors Alliance, a liberal group whose members include District Attorneys Pamela Price of Alameda County, Diana Becton of Contra Costa County and George Gascón of Los Angeles County. The group called the measure “a long overdue reform to address the harms of racial profiling and promote equal treatment under law.”

Support also came from civil rights advocates, the city of Berkeley, and the counties of Los Angeles and Sonoma.