Davis Vetoes Racial Data Legislation

Asserting that the state has no business scrutinizing local police, Gov. Gray Davis on Tuesday vetoed a controversial bill requiring the California Highway Patrol and local law enforcement departments to collect racial and ethnic information on every motorist they stop.

Davis conceded that minority motorists may be the victims of “abhorrent” discrimination by some police officers simply because of their color, but insisted that “this legislation does not provide the answer” to such prejudice and “does not outlaw the practice of racial profiling.”

In a veto message, the Democratic governor, who drew support from both the law enforcement establishment and the African American and Latino communities in his election victory last year, said there is evidence of a “few specific” cases where racial profiling has occurred.

But he said “there is no evidence that this practice is taking place statewide, requiring sweeping legislation that mandates state scrutiny of every local law enforcement agency in California.”

Davis, however, said he will order the Highway Patrol to create a three-year program, starting Jan. 1, to gather such data from every stop that officers make. That would not affect local police agencies.

Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City), the bill’s author and an early political supporter of Davis, angrily assailed the veto.

“He had a clear choice between cops and minorities,” Murray said. “He chose cops. It sends a really horrible message to members of minorities in our state and in the nation.”

The bill (SB 78) was intended to document conclusively whether minority drivers are singled out because they fit a certain criminal profile, a practice known as “driving while black/brown.”

Murray, who is black, has argued that minority drivers are routinely pulled over in numbers that far exceed their proportion in the motoring population. The senator contends that he was a victim of the practice in 1998 in Beverly Hills and unsuccessfully sued the department.

The ACLU of Southern California denounced Davis’ action.

“The governor, by vetoing this bill, has told the public he doesn’t care if minority motorists think they are being treated unfairly,” said Elizabeth Schroeder, the group’s associate director. “He doesn’t care if they really are being treated unfairly. He doesn’t want to know.”

Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks had urged Davis to veto the measure, asserting that highly sensitive issues such as allegations of “harassment and the propriety of any search cannot and should not be made via a raw statistical survey.”

Parks also warned that the analysis of raw statistics does a “disservice to the community, circumvents the department’s disciplinary system” and poses potential civil liability problems to government agencies.