Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies in 2019 stopped Black drivers for minor traffic violations — such as broken brake lights and invalid registrations — at a rate five times higher than white drivers, a new report found.
Law enforcement officers sometimes initiate so-called pretextual stops to look for evidence of criminal activity — such as warrants, drugs, or guns — even when they don’t have reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed or probable cause for a search.
In the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office, the stops do not typically result in charges, but cause irreversible trauma to communities of color, and wasting millions in taxpayer dollars, the report alleged.
The report was produced by Catalyst California and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which are both advocacy organizations that share the mission of advancing justice and equity.
Among officer-initiated stops for traffic violations by Sacramento deputies in 2019, about 75% of time was spent on stops that resulted in a warning or no action, the report found, amounting to a whopping $35 million in taxpayer dollars.
“Any police stop is not a trivial encounter, and it can have a deleterious effect on the mental health of the person stopped,” stated the report, which was compiled using data from the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act. “Even when an encounter with (a deputy) does not culminate in deadly force — or involve any force at all — it can still have a lasting detrimental impact, especially for Black people.”
The ACLU and Catalyst California called on the Sheriff’s Office to create a policy to prohibit pretextual stops, and for the DA’s Office to stop filing charges that stem from the stops, in which the deputy had no independent probable cause or other legal justification to pull over the driver.
The 2019 data predates the swearing in of District Attorney Thien Ho and Sheriff Jim Cooper, which happened about a year ago, the report pointed out.
“With new leadership in these key governmental roles, now is an ideal time to act,” the report stated.
Spokespeople for the DA’s Office and Sheriff’s Department declined to say Thursday whether those agencies are considering the policy changes the report recommends.
“The Sacramento District Attorney’s Office is guided by the principle of ‘Equal Justice Under the Law,’” DA spokeswoman Shelly Orio said in a statement. “Every case is evaluated based on the available facts, our ethical obligations, and legal standards derived from the Constitution. It is not appropriate to speculate or comment on whether charges would be filed on a case that has not yet been submitted to our office for review.”
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi did not respond to a request for comment on the report. When a reporter asked if he could confirm a statistic in the report related to his office, his only response was to write “PRA” — referring to the California Public Records Act that is the statute that journalists and members of the inquiring publish can use to file requests for information held by government officials. Once a PRA is filed, the receiving agency has 10 days to respond.
Report calls for public defender funding
The report also urges the Board of Supervisors to increase funding for the public defender’s office, whose responsibilities grew this year due to a new state law, and also for a team that provides emergency services for people experiencing a mental health crisis.
The public defenders received $62 million in this year’s budget, about half the amount of funding allocated to the DA’s Office, the report stated. With more funding, the public defender’s office could hire more staff, improve recidivism, support incarcerated people with mental health care needs, reduce jail overcrowding, and provide discharge plans.
County spokeswoman Kim Nava said the board has approved a significant 63 new positions in the public defender’s office from 2019 to 2023, for a total of 218 positions, many of whom are assigned to expanding the types of programs mentioned in the report.
“We have made significant investments since 2019, the year they are focusing on, in the public defender’s (office) and other related agencies,” County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy said. “The Community Review Commission (which provides Sheriff’s Office oversight) is funded, staffed, trained and has been granted subpoena power for investigation.”
The report still recommends the board increase public defender’s office funding by at least $9 million, partly for attorneys to help with mental health diversion to help the county comply with a 2019 legal settlement it’s been violating, a grand jury found earlier this year.
The report also calls on the board to increase funding to its office of the inspector general to add positions and to pay the members of the Community Review Commission. It also recommends funding for organizations such as NorCal Resist, which provide free brake light maintenance and other services aimed to reduce the number of pretextual stops.
In order to find those funds, the report’s authors suggest the board should reduce Sheriff’s Office budget. The Sheriff’s budget has been increasing, hitting $696 million in the current fiscal year. But despite that, its violent crime solve rate has been decreasing, and in 2022 it cleared 18% of violent crimes, the report stated.
“Communities are safe when every person is healthy, secure, and supported,” the report stated. “Sacramento County’s budget — which, in many ways, is a statement of what it most values — does not reflect this fundamental truth.”
Kennedy said he previously tried to remove $1.5 million from the Sheriff’s Office budget to create a non-law enforcement 911 alternative for mental health calls, but he could not get enough votes to do so.
Although the ACLU report focuses on the Sheriff’s Office, Sacramento Police Department has also been criticized for pretextual stops of drivers of color.
An audit earlier this year revealed a “systemic problem” of officers engaging in a pattern of unreasonable stops, searches, and seizures violating community members’ Fourth Amendment right, specifically Black and Latino residents. The council received the audit in June, and was supposed to to discuss it again publicly, but has not yet done so.
The ACLU produced similar reports for Sheriff’s offices in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego, said ACLU spokeswoman Lisa White. It chose to use 2019 data partly because “the pandemic greatly affected public safety in numerous, atypical ways in 2020 and 2021. Therefore, our analysis focused on 2019 which was the most recent year of data available at the time we undertook this project.”
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By: Theresa Clift, The Sacramento Bee©2023 The Sacramento Bee. Visit at sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
