Black Lives Matter: California cops report who they stop and why

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LA TIMES

New report reveals who gets stopped by the police in California

​​A new report was released about traffic and pedestrian stops by California law enforcement agencies. The data include a breakdown of race/ethnicity with troubling findings of bias.
In Oct. 2015, then California Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 953, a law that requires police to collect data on the people they stop, including perceived race and ethnicity, the reason for the encounter, and the outcome.

The legislation was a response to “the deaths of unarmed black men and other people of color by police,” the bill's author, Assemblywoman Shirley N. Weber (D-San Diego), said at the time. Those incidents “have forced us to confront some ugly truths about the persistence of racial bias in law enforcement.”

When it passed, law enforcement was not a fan of the bill.

“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and the national trustee for the California Fraternal Order of Police, said at the time. "There is criminal profiling that exists.”

Earlier this month, we saw the latest annual 2020 report of traffic and pedestrian stops. It contains data from 18 law enforcement agencies, including the 15 largest law enforcement agencies in California, from Jan. 1, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2020.

What do the numbers show? Let’s dig in:

Main highlights from the report
The agencies that provided data made more than 2.9 million stops, with the California Highway Patrol conducting the most (57.7%). Despite three more agencies contributing data in 2020, there were actually 26.5% fewer stops reported than in 2019.

The most common reason reported for conducting a stop across all racial/ethnic groups was a traffic violation (86.1%), followed by what the report described as a “reasonable suspicion” that the person was engaged in criminal activity (11.5%). A higher percentage of Black people were stopped for reasonable suspicion than any other racial identity group.

People perceived to be Latino (40.4%), white (31.7%), or Black (16.5%) made up the vast majority of stopped individuals. The graph below shows a breakdown of these stops.
“Officers searched, detained on the curb or in a patrol car, handcuffed, and removed from vehicles more individuals perceived as Black than individuals perceived as white, even though they stopped more than double the number of individuals perceived as white than individuals perceived as Black,” the report states.

The report also found that people perceived to be transgender women were 2.5 times more likely to be searched than women who appeared to be cisgender (note: the data is based on how officers perceive people, not how they identify themselves. As the report states, "Individuals may self-identify differently than how an officer may perceive them. This distinction is critical because racial and identity profiling occurs because of how people perceive others and act based on that perception rather than how individuals see themselves").

"Stopped individuals perceived to be transgender women/girls had the highest proportion of their stops involve the officer taking actions towards them (61.7%), and individuals perceived to be transgender men/boys also had actions taken toward them during more than half of their stops (60%)," the report states.

Officers perceived 1.2% of the people they stopped to have one or more disabilities. The most common disability reported was mental health disability (70.3%). Officers searched individuals perceived to have a mental health disability 4.8 times more often. Officers were 5.2 times more likely to use force against people with perceived mental health disabilities than those without.

Again, here is a link to the full report. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/r ... t-2022.pdf

Related reading:
— Scientists who analyzed the body-camera footage from more than 100 police officers have found a subtle but clear pattern: During traffic stops, officers spoke to Black men in a less respectful and less friendly tone than they did to white men.

— This past November, The Times reported that 7 of every 10 bike stops by L.A. sheriff’s deputies involve Latino cyclists. “You feel powerless,” said Ubaldo Delacruz, a Boyle Heights resident who has been stopped several times in East L.A.