Lawsuit Filed on Eve of California Assembly’s Vote to Ban Pretext Stops
Special to the Vanguard
Beverly Hills, CA – On Tuesday, a class action lawsuit was filed against the City of Beverly Hills on behalf of 1,086 Black people alleged to have been unjustly arrested between 2019 and 2021. Of the over 1,000 individuals who were arrested only two were convicted of a crime, a tantalizing figure that suggests there was insufficient evidence underpinning the stops to begin with.
“These attorneys are advocating on behalf of Black people arrested in Beverly Hills, and tomorrow we’ll see if this community has advocates in Sacramento,” said Cristine DeBerry, Founder and Executive Director of the Prosecutors Alliance of California. “It’s time to address the harms caused by racial profiling, as pulling people over for petty violations causes fear, humiliation, and distrust in law enforcement and the criminal legal system more broadly. It can also lead to deadly consequences without providing any added safety benefit.”
The California State Assembly is poised to vote on Senate Bill 50 in the days ahead. The legislation is authored by Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) and is a priority supported bill of the Prosecutors Alliance of California. It would prohibit a peace officer from initiating a traffic stop for many low-level violations unless there is a separate, independent reason. The Los Angeles Times has weighed in to support the legislation and other jurisdictions that have implemented similar such policies have seen improvements in safety.
Researchers have repeatedly found that police search Black and Latino people far more often than Whites during traffic stops, even though Whites who are stopped are more often found to have contraband. Police are also significantly more likely to use force against Black people during these stops.
A 2022 study by Catalyst California and ACLU SoCal found that instead of addressing community concerns about serious crime, sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles and Riverside counties spend nearly 9 out of every 10 hours on stops initiated by officers rather than responding to calls for help. Among those officer-initiated stops, approximately 80 percent are for traffic violations.
Additionally, in its report released earlier this year, the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board found that people who were perceived as Black were stopped and searched at 2.2 times the rate of people perceived as white. Overall, officers searched 6,622 more people perceived as Black than those perceived as white. Furthermore, those perceived to be Black adolescents between 15 to 17 years old were searched at nearly six times the rate of those perceived as white youth.
A group of judges and academics appointed by the governor concluded that pretext stops do not improve public safety; instead, they use valuable resources that could be redirected to more effective public safety approaches. In effect, reprioritizing traffic stops to focus on safety-related violations, like speeding and driving while impaired, rather than pretextual violations, can reduce motor vehicle injuries and racial disparities while bolstering public safety by freeing up policing resources to respond to serious violent crimes including homicides and sexual assaults.
