Traffic stops—some 20 million annually—are the most common interaction Americans have with police. As in other aspects of American life, one’s race plays a role in who gets stopped most frequently, why, and what happens thereafter.
The Stanford Open Policing Project in 2020 analyzed data on vehicle stops from twenty-one state patrol agencies and thirty-five city police departments from 2011 to 2018. The analysts found that Black drivers were stopped 43 percent more often than white drivers relative to their portion of the population. They also found that Black and Latinx drivers had their cars searched twice as often as white drivers, although contraband was found about equally in Black and white drivers’ possession, and less so in that of Latinx.
Under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA), California law enforcement agencies are surveying their patrol officers to see why they stop Black and Latinx drivers disproportionately more often than the more numerous white drivers. The Department of Justice first asked local policing agencies how many complaints they received about racial profiling. Most of those who replied reported few to no such complaints.
In view of numerous anecdotal accounts of such stops, our Subcommittee on Policing Practices is conducting an informal survey of persons of color about their experience of racial profiling in four cities: Pasadena, Altadena, Monrovia, and Duarte. This anonymous online survey, an informal snapshot, is being done with the help of co-sponsors NAACP Pasadena and Altadena, National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Pasadenans Organizing for Progress (POP!), and other partners.
We plan to share the survey results with the RIPA Board and with the police chiefs, sheriff station captains, and organizational contacts in the four cities. We also want to share how other American cities have driven down the numbers of racially profiled stops and searches through ending “pretextual” traffic stops where officers stop drivers on the basis of vague suspicion, through use of required written consent from drivers to search their vehicles and by holding supervisors accountable for inequitable behavior of their officers based on tracking racial disparities data collection.
We are looking for League observers of policing matters in these cities. For further information please contact Kris Ockershauser kmopas [at] earthlink.net.
—Kris Ockershauser, Co-chair, Policing Practices Subcommittee
