Baca Rejects Study of Race Link to Traffic Stops

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has rebuffed the Board of Supervisors’ request that his department track the ethnicity of drivers stopped by his deputies to determine whether the deputies engage in racial profiling.

With Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks already vocally opposed to collecting such data, Baca’s decision means there will be no sizable study of whether law enforcement officers in the nation’s largest county stop motorists because of their race rather than because they have evidence that the driver has broken a law.

In November, the board asked Baca to explore the feasibility of such a study. In a memo sent to supervisors in response, Baca wrote that the analysis could require six months of computer programming and an extra 50,000 hours of extra work annually.

“I believe this program is unwise and cannot support its implementation,” Baca wrote, adding that he remains opposed to discrimination by law enforcement personnel and wants to take other steps to prevent racial profiling.

Specifically, the sheriff wants to analyze complaints from the public to determine whether specific officers have a pattern of racial profiling, said Lt. Robert Elson. “He is not making a statement one way or another that incidents like this don’t occur,” Elson said.

In a wide statistical sample such as the one proposed, Elson contended, “you’re not going to get any information that’s going to tell you what the department policy is because nobody’s going to agree what the statistics mean.” He said that in some cities, police and advocates have differed over whether a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos being stopped prove the existence of racial profiling.

“It’s not good enough,” said Miguel Santana, a spokesman for Supervisor Gloria Molina. “People who file complaints are those who feel the process is going to work. . . . Many people in the minority community do not trust law enforcement to begin with. The sample’s going to be a skewed one.”

The department’s response has startled other supervisors, who cannot force the sheriff, an independently elected official, to compile such data.

“This is a national issue. This is not going away,” said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, citing the issue’s prominence in the recent Democratic caucus debate in Iowa this week.

She cited numerous local cases in which blacks or Latinos have complained that they were detained by police because of their race, including that of a black Virginia judge who was forced to lie on hot asphalt in Venice for 30 minutes last summer after being stopped by LAPD officers. That judge has filed a federal lawsuit against the department, and Burke said one of her friends is readying a similar suit.

She said she would continue urging Baca and Chief Parks to reconsider their positions.

LAPD officials did not return calls seeking comment, but Parks has said his agency does not engage in racial profiling and need not study the issue.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky--who with Burke proposed the motion asking Baca to study the issue--also urged the sheriff and police chief to compile the statistics. “With the two biggest police agencies in the county not addressing this issue, it leaves a big part of California out of the equation,” he said.

Although Baca believes such analysis is logistically impossible, more than 70 other California police agencies are compiling such statistics, said state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City), whose bill to require all California law enforcement agencies to study whether profiling occurs was vetoed by the governor last year.

Murray--who unsuccessfully sued the Beverly Hills police for allegedly stopping him because he is black--called Baca’s arguments a “smoke screen. . . . They don’t want to have anybody look at the policies of their office.”

A spokesman for the San Jose Police Department said that agency has tracked the race of motorists its officers stop since June while adding only minimal extra work. The San Jose chief “feels comfortable enough our officers don’t do” racial profiling, Officer Rubens Dalaison said. “That’s why he said: ‘Yeah, let’s go ahead and gather the information.’ It’s relatively easy to do.”

But Elson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said his agency is set up differently from San Jose’s and would not be able to gather the data as easily.

In addition to studying public complaints, Baca said he favored other systems to ensure that his deputies were acting professionally and not discriminating, such as videotaping all traffic stops. He also said he has directed his managers to make sure deputies are receiving “appropriate instruction on conducting lawful traffic stops that comply with the Equal Protection Clause to the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Supervisors said they are skeptical that the alternatives would have the same value as a complete study but said they would work with the sheriff.

“I know from what he believes personally that he can’t be happy about the notion that his or any other department is stopping people due to the color of their skin,” Yaroslavsky said.

Indeed, Baca--the county’s first Latino sheriff in more than 100 years--has spoken with unusual public fervor about fighting discrimination.

Racial profiling is the term for the alleged police practice of pulling over black and Latino drivers, often in the hopes of discovering some evidence such as drugs or an outstanding warrant that would lead to an arrest. On the receiving end, the phenomenon is known as “DWB”--”Driving While Black” or “Driving While Brown.”

The issue has leaped into the foreground of the public debate over racism and law enforcement to such an extent that Bill Bradley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, challenged Vice President Al Gore during a debate earlier this week to get the president to sign an executive order banning racial profiling. Gore has said he would sign such an order if elected president.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice struck an agreement with the state of New Jersey to prevent racial profiling in the Garden State. The accord came after months of turmoil after an investigation that found that blacks and Latinos constituted 75% of motorists stopped by state troopers in one part of the state, and the resignation of the state police superintendent after he made remarks that implied certain ethnic groups were more likely to transport drugs.