San Francisco prohibits dangerous pretext stops
Sameena Usman - Board Member
On January 11, 2023, after a months-long campaign to address the obvious racial disparities in the San Francisco police department’s (“SFPD”) stop data, the San Francisco Police Commission voted 4-2 to approve a measure that will limit pretextual traffic stops in an effort to help reduce racial bias in policing. A pretext stop occurs when an officer stops someone for a lawful traffic violation or minor infraction with the intention to use the stop to investigate a hunch regarding a different crime that by itself would not amount to reasonable suspicion or probable cause. While pretext stops are legal, this practice is widely criticized and often described as a fishing expedition, which is supported by the data that shows these types of stops do not yield high rates of contraband or evidence. The reasons police state for making such stops often include broken taillights, or expired registration tags which cause no harm to others. San Francisco joins Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C. and the state of Virginia in banning these types of stops. The California legislature is currently reviewing a bill proposed by Senator Bradford that would also eliminate this practice. “Law enforcement openly admit that many of these are ‘pretext stops’ to investigate serious offenses — yet data show these traffic stops rarely result in the discovery of evidence of crime,” the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code said in its annual report recommending changes in the state’s criminal laws.
This practice has disproportionately affected people of color, who are often targeted based on racial profiling. San Francisco is not alone in this category, as the California Attorney General’s Racial Identity Profiling Act (“RIPA”) report for this year showed that statewide, Black and Latinx drivers were stopped at numbers disproportionate to their population data, that Black and Latinx drivers were more likely to have force used against them than whites or Asians, and that Black teenage drivers were six times more likely to be detained and searched than white teenagers were. These practices are not confined to those driving an automobile – pedestrians and bicyclists are subjected to these same harmful interactions with similar results – Black and Latinx individuals are disproportionately subject to such stops, use of force, and searches, and yet detained whites have higher rates of contraband and subsequent arrests as a percentage than either Black or Latinx individuals. A Chronicle analysis of data from SFPD stops that occurred between July 2018 and June 2022 showed that Black people were 10.5 times more likely to be pulled over than white people.
The vote to approve the proposal came after months of public scrutiny and changes to the plan that ultimately shrunk the proposed list of banned stops from 18 different types of offenses to nine. Beyond the civil liberties harm itself, such practices divert valuable police resources away from fighting violent crime. “There are a cluster of low-level traffic stops that are just not yielding any public safety benefit for the city,” Commission Vice President Max Carter-Oberstone said in the SF Standard. “But they do take up a lot of time and they do cost a lot of money and by curtailing those stops we can reallocate all of those law enforcement resources to other strategies that we know are effective.” Mr. Carter-Oberstone wisely shared data from the City itself showing that enforcement of the different violations had no statistically significant impact on public safety, yet the practice itself often lead to civil liberties harm. Stated simply, there was no upside to the general public to continuing such enforcement practices, but there certainly was a downside.
Our Board Member Sameena Usman, in her last hurrah as a seventeen-year legislative advocate and government relations coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, played a key role in the coalition campaigning for these policy changes, a coalition which included Glide Memorial, All of Us or None of Us, the San Francisco Public Defender, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and many others. Secure Justice joined over 100 organizations in supporting the campaign.
[Editor’s note]
Although the impact Sameena had on local, state, and national politics during her seventeen-year career is impossible to adequately capture in a short blog post, the following is a list of her more notable legislative achievements:
· California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA)
· California Assembly Resolution Recognizing August as Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month for 7 years, followed by proclamations in Alameda County, Berkeley, Dublin, Foster City, Fremont, Hayward, Livermore, Milpitas, Oakland, Pleasanton, Redwood City, San Jose, San Ramon, Santa Clara, Santa Clara County, Santa Clara USD, Santa Cruz, Union City
· California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act
· California’s Safe Place to Learn Act amendments in 2015 and 2018
· Oakland Police Department’s Termination of Participation in the Joint Terror Task Force (JTTF), and suspension in San Francisco
· San Francisco Police Commission Ban on Pretextual Stops
· The nation’s first Controlled Military Equipment Ordinance in Berkeley, followed by Oakland and Statewide
· The nation’s first Facial Recognition Ban in San Francisco, followed by Oakland, Berkeley, and a moratorium for police body cameras Statewide
· The nation’s first Non-Cooperation with Identity-Based Registry Ordinance in San Francisco, followed by Anti-Internment/Anti-Registry resolutions in Santa Clara County, Fremont, and Statewide
· The nation’s first Predictive Policing Analytics and Biometric Surveillance Technologies Ban in Oakland
· The nation’s first Sanctuary City Contracting Ordinance in Richmond followed by Oakland and Berkeley
· The nation’s first Surveillance Technology & Community Safety Ordinance in Santa Clara County, followed by Berkeley, Oakland, SF, Palo Alto, and BART
· Wage Theft Ordinances in Santa Clara County, Santa Clara USD, San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas
During their five-year legislative collaboration and encompassing dozens of ordinance votes and dozens more policy votes, Sameena Usman and Brian Hofer went undefeated and suffered only two single individual no votes – a 6-1 win in Richmond, CA (Sanctuary Contracting Ordinance), and a 10-1 win in San Francisco, CA (Surveillance Ordinance). Every other victory was by unanimous Yes.