*Black people make up 5.4% of California’s population but accounted for nearly 13% of all traffic stops in 2022.
An annual report compiled by California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board for the first time includes data from all the state’s law enforcement agencies, ABC 7 News reports.
Nearly 4.6 million vehicle and pedestrian stops were reported by 535 law enforcement agencies in 2022. Twenty-five other departments reported zero stops that year.
Hispanic or Latino people accounted for nearly 43% of traffic stops in 2002, while white people accounted for over 32%, per the report.
“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,” Andrea Guerrero, co-chairperson of the board and executive director of Alliance San Diego, said in a statement, according to ABC 7 News.
Guerrero said the “scale of data that California is collecting allows us to say definitively that profiling exists – it is a pervasive pattern across the state.”
Here’s more from The Associated Press:
The report includes what officers perceived to be the race, ethnicity, gender and disability status of people they stop so that the state can better identify and analyze bias in policing.
The data includes how officers perceive an individual’s race or gender, even if it’s different than how the person identifies, because the officer’s perception is what drives bias, the report said.
The report said Native American motorists were more likely to be searched and handcuffed in 2022, while Black people were typically detained curbside or in a patrol car.
Among the advisory board’s recommendations is limiting the role of police in traffic law enforcement.
The board also calls for ending “pretextual stops” – “stops initiated by law enforcement for a minor traffic violation, with the actual purpose of investigating or searching for evidence of another, unrelated crime.”
READ MORE: Traffic Stop Data Finds LA Police Search Black Drivers Most – Even Though Whites Have More Drugs
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