SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A new analysis by the ACLU contends Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office deputies spend an exorbitant amount of time pulling over drivers for minor traffic violations, a practice that disproportionately harms Black and brown communities while wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.
Roughly two-thirds of time that deputies spend on stops is for traffic violations — namely things like busted tail lights or expired registration tags — according to the report from Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. Those relatively minor violations often serve as a pretext for deputies to pull over drivers suspected of other crimes, the report says, even though there are often no other offenses reported.
Among the deputy-initiated stops for traffic violations, the organizations found approximately 75% of hours are spent on stops that result in a warning or no action at all — something the organizations said undermines law enforcement’s argument that traffic stops are a vital part of keeping the public safe.
“They argue that they’re necessary to prevent, investigate and solve crime,” said Eva Bitran, a staff attorney with ACLU SoCal, during a news conference announcing the findings. “This is a waste of time and money by any metric.”
Using 2019 data that the Sheriff’s Office reported to the state through the Racial & Identity Profiling Act, the organizations found that Black people were over 4.5 times as likely to be pulled over for a traffic violation than were whites.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately return a request for comment.
The organizations looked at data on traffic stops for sheriff’s offices in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties. They found that counties and cities annually spend more than $25 billion on sheriff’s and police departments.
“Outdated ‘tough-on-crime’ approaches not only fail to advance safety, but also disproportionately harm communities of color,” Chauncee Smith, senior manager of Reimagine Justice & Safety at Catalyst California, wrote in a statement accompanying the report.
“Rather than wasting billions of public dollars on unproductive patrol activities, policymakers must rethink ‘public safety’ and ensure that our collective welfare is truly rooted in the public — community members, especially those of highest need — rather than law enforcement.”
California lawmakers considered a bill this year from Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, that would have prohibited a police officer from initiating a traffic stop for a low-level infraction unless there was a separate, independent basis to pull someone over. The idea behind Senate 1389 was to reduce the disproportionate impact of such stops on communities of color.
Officers have used such pretextual stops to “fish” for information from motorists or look into other “suspected criminal activity,” Bradford said previously. Some departments, including Oakland and Los Angeles, have modified their policies for pulling over motorists for low-level infractions.
The bill was opposed by California’s powerful law enforcement unions and was ultimately shelved.
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