Black drivers in California were stopped “more frequently than expected” by law enforcement, compared to their proportion of the state’s population, according to a report released this week by the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board.
In 2022, 12.5% of traffic stops in California involved drivers that officers perceived to be Black, but Black people only represent about 5.4% of the state’s population, the report stated.
Drivers perceived to be Hispanic made up nearly 43% of stops, followed by 32.5% of White drivers, the report states.
The 2021 American Community Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau, shows Hispanic or Latino residents in California were 39.5% of the total population in the state, and nearly 36% were White.
The report’s findings are based on data from the more than 4.5 million traffic stops California law enforcement agencies made in 2022.
Andrea Guerrero, the board’s co-chair and executive director of the nonprofit, Alliance San Diego, said for the first time the report includes data from law enforcement agencies across the entire state and shows the impact of profiling.
“The scale of data that California is collecting allows us to say definitively that profiling exists — it is a pervasive pattern across the state. We must now turn to the hard work of ending profiling by bringing all the stakeholders to the table to ascertain and change the policies and the practices that enable it,” Guerrero said in a statement.
The report analyzed what officers reported or perceived to be the race, ethnicity, gender and disability status of people stopped, the reason for the traffic stop, the actions taken by officers and the outcome.
More than 82% of stops across all racial and ethnic groups were prompted by traffic violations and 14.2% by “reasonable suspicion” that a driver was engaged in criminal activity.
Drivers believed to be Native American or Black were the most stopped due to “reasonable suspicion.”
The report found that all drivers perceived to be from a racial or ethnic group of color were searched by law enforcement at higher rates than those perceived as White, “except for those perceived as Asian, Middle Easter/South Asian, and Pacific Islander.”
The advisory board also shared a series of recommendations they hope stakeholders will consider to eliminate racial and identity profiling. Those recommendations include ways to end “pretextual stops,” which happen when an officer stops a driver for a traffic violation with the intent of investigating a different offense or crime.
