Audit: Bias, far-right thinking among police going unchecked
A state audit of five law enforcement agencies in California, including San Jose and Stockton, found bias among officers toward people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ people, as well as a smattering of support for far-right extremist organizations such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters.
The audit also found the agencies had insufficient policies in place to safeguard against such attitudes within their ranks, to investigate them when they are alleged or to address them once identified, according to a report issued by the state auditor's office this week.
“As a result, these departments are at a higher risk of being unaware of and unable to effectively address the ways in which their officers exhibit bias,” the audit found.
The audit was conducted at the request of state lawmakers. It comes amid rising concerns nationally about far-right extremism among police and other law enforcement officers, as well as evidence that bias complaints against California officers are overwhelmingly dismissed after internal investigations.
On the national level, attention to the problem increased after it was revealed that police officers were among those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In California, a recent Times investigation found that police agencies across the state upheld just 49 racial profiling complaints from 2016 to 2019, or less than 2% of the roughly 3,500 allegations filed.
The Los Angeles Police Department has been accused of showing sympathy to far-right protesters at demonstrations in L.A., and L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva recently said 80% of his workforce was “conservative and far right.”
The new audit, requested by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, assessed bias within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the San Bernardino, San Jose and Stockton police departments.
The report does not say how those agencies were chosen, and officials in the state auditor's office would not provide that information — other than to say that auditors sought to include agencies from a variety of jurisdictions and geographic locations across the state.
The auditors reviewed five internal investigations from each of the five departments, including cases in which members of the public initiated bias complaints, and sought to review social media posts of 750 individual officers, the report said.
Although many officers' social media accounts were never found and others were private, the auditors nonetheless found that at least 17 officers had posted “biased statements or content” online, including posts that “either promoted negative stereotypes or contained deliberately hateful and derogatory speech directed at groups of people.”
When two San Jose Police Department officers were called to a dispute between a landlord and tenant, auditors found that they made derogatory comments about the Vietnamese landlord before arriving.
“I would say she's about 5 foot 4 inches, very skinny, bad teeth, very heavy accent,” one officer said.
The officers then denied a request from the landlord for a translator, demanded that she pay the tenant a cash deposit, threatened to take her to jail if she didn't, joked about her not having any money and having a gambling addiction, and placed her in the back of a patrol car until another neighbor paid the cash.
After the department determined racial bias played a factor in the case, one of the officers received a 40hour suspension without pay. The other was not punished.
The auditors noted that the biased posts and comments they identified were “generated by a small number of the officers at each department,” but they said that “concluding on that basis alone that bias is not a significant problem at these departments would be incorrect.”
“By its nature, our review was not designed to catalogue every instance of biased conduct or statements by officers at these departments. Our work encompassed only a limited number of internal investigations and the publicly shared views of a selection of officers,” they wrote. “Moreover, the behavior of even a few officers can erode a community's trust in law enforcement and damage the relationship between a department and the community it serves.”
The San Jose Police Department largely accepted the recommendations of the audit and said it was working to address — or had already addressed — the noted shortcomings in how it handled bias. The Stockton Police Department said it would be reviewing the recommendations and implementing needed changes. The San Bernardino Police Department did not submit a formal response to the audit's findings.