More Police Agencies Keeping Racial Data

A growing number of California police agencies have launched programs to track the race and ethnicity of motorists stopped for traffic violations, a voluntary effort to determine whether racial profiling is a common problem in the state.

More than 30 agencies are involved in programs that mirror the requirements of a bill vetoed by Gov. Gray Davis on Tuesday, which would have required the California Highway Patrol and local police departments to collect racial and ethnic data on every motorist they pull over.

Instead, the governor ordered the CHP to gather such information for every stop its officers make, beginning Friday. The program will last three years.

And the governor Wednesday sent letters to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna urging them to order their police agencies to begin collecting data from traffic stops, which he said is a local responsibility.

Davis said he vetoed the bill because the state has no business scrutinizing local police.

Police agencies from San Diego to San Francisco have previously agreed to compile detailed statistics and make the data public.

“We think it’s the right thing to do,” said Tony McElroy, spokesman for the San Diego Police Department, which will start collecting the information in January and is testing a system that will rely on laptop and hand-held computers.

Most local agencies will compile information on drivers that is in line with the requirements of the bill by state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City): race, ethnicity and age of motorists, why a driver was pulled over, whether a search was conducted, and whether the stop ended in a citation, arrest, warning or no action.

Of the state’s largest city police departments, only Los Angeles has been opposed to collecting racial profile data. Last month, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks said such information could be misconstrued and would put a chill on good police work. He said the LAPD does not have a systemic problem of racial profiling.

“If it is going on, we should investigate it and people should report it and we should deal with it as that incident,” Parks said in August, after a meeting of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission. “We should not create statistics.” A spokesman for the Police Department said this week that Parks’ views have not changed.

Civil rights groups, African Americans and Latinos have complained about racial profiling for years, contending that minorities on the road are targeted by police as drug traffickers, sometimes depending on the vehicle they’re driving.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has a civil rights lawsuit pending in federal court against the CHP, alleging that its officers routinely use racial profiling in their drug interdiction program.

Many police officials, who insist their departments don’t engage in racial profiling, say it is important to collect the information to maintain credibility with their multiethnic communities.

“I don’t believe racial profiling exists, but if we want to maintain the trust and credibility of our communities and show we don’t have anything to hide, it’s better to be out front on this issue,” said Burnham Matthews, Alameda’s police chief and president of the Alameda County Chiefs of Police and Sheriff’s Assn.

The association announced last week that police officers throughout the populous East Bay county will begin keeping track in October of the races of motorists stopped by law enforcement.

“We’re concerned if the community is concerned,” Matthews said.

Activists who have tracked the issue for years, while applauding the steps taken by police to compile information, say racial profiling is particularly acute in drug interdiction programs. They say that won’t be apparent from numbers based on regular traffic stops.

Brian Campbell, a criminal defense attorney in Needles, Calif., supports keeping statistics but contends officers trained to stop drug traffickers rely more heavily on racial profiling than officers making routine traffic stops.

“The drug interdiction officer is looking for other things,” Campbell said. “Instead of a legitimate traffic code violation, [interdiction officers] are interested in getting into a person’s life and their vehicle . . . for further detaining and questioning.”

That issue is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in June against the CHP and the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement by the ACLU. The suit contends the CHP has used racial profiling extensively in a years-long drug interdiction program that used traffic stops as a pretext to search the cars of male blacks and Latinos for drugs.

The lawsuit contends that the stops are part of a federally funded drug interdiction program called Operation Pipeline, which encourages police to be suspicious of blacks and Latinos driving on highways.

“Tens of thousands of innocent motorists are stopped on California’s highways every year, searched and treated like criminals based on nothing more than an officer’s mistaken hunch,” the lawsuit says. “Racial minorities are the principal victims.”

The ACLU lawsuit contends that in 1997 alone, the CHP’s canine units, which are part of Operation Pipeline, stopped and searched nearly 34,000 people, fewer than 2% of whom were found to be carrying drugs.

The CHP declined to comment about Operation Pipeline, but Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick said Wednesday that he is “very comfortable that you won’t find [racial profiling] in the Highway Patrol.”

“If it goes on,” Helmick said, “it’s an isolated case that I will fix. A lot of our people are very offended at even the hint that they are doing this.”

The ACLU also is pushing for the state to release a report on the CHP and Operation Pipeline. The report, compiled by the Joint Legislative Task Force on Government Oversight, is being withheld by the Assembly Rules Committee on the grounds that it hasn’t been “formally issued yet.”

“It is outrageous that information on a public policy area is being kept secret,” said John Crew, director of the ACLU’s police practices project.

Other states, such as New Jersey and Maryland, have found that minorities have been pulled over a disproportionate number of times.

Times staff writer Carl Ingram contributed to this story.