SF may overhaul traffic policing. Other cities already have.

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It’s not often that a southern city beats San Francisco in progressive reforms. But when it comes to revamping traffic policies to prevent racial disparities in enforcement, at least one town is far ahead of us. 

While San Francisco debates and dithers around a traffic policy change to tackle disparate policing, Fayetteville, North Carolina, began to prioritize traffic safety over minor stops in 2013. Its goals: To reduce vehicle crashes and shrink racial disparities. 

The police chief at the time, Harold Medlock, directed his officers to avoid stops for expired registrations and equipment violations and instead focus on safety stops like speeding and running red lights. In cities across the country, police officers use minor infractions like these as an excuse, or pretext, to stop someone and look for additional crimes that have been committed. 

Medlock’s plan worked, according to studies. 

The number and proportion of stops conducted for safety or moving violations increased, while the disproportionate rate at which Blacks were stopped dropped. Traffic fatalities, injuries, and crashes also declined. Crime, meanwhile, remained unchanged. 

“Fayetteville had a really good experience,” said Frank Baumgartner, a professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied traffic enforcement policy in the state and beyond. The police chief gave “strong instructions,” he said, and the department’s leadership team enforced the shift in approach. 

Baumgartner added that people in Fayetteville began calling 911 more often, an indicator that, with the new approach to traffic enforcement, trust in police improved. 

The state of Washington took similar measures in the late ’90s. But after a 2012 court decision effectively reinstated pretext stops, non-white drivers began experiencing markedly more stops and searches, compared to white ones. 

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Police Department instructed its officers to make stops for lower-level equipment infractions only if they “significantly” interfere with public safety. Pretextual stops can only be made if the officers can articulate reasons to investigate a further crime — and spell them out on their body-worn camera.  

Recent data from Los Angeles showed that minor traffic stops plummeted, and searches of Black people have decreased. “I’m not sure there’s a one-size fits-all solution,” said the LAPD’s director of constitutional policing and policy, Lizabeth Rhodes. She told Mission Local that she is cautiously optimistic about the apparent improvements to racial disparities seen in Los Angeles. 

Oakland also saw some success in reducing its racial disparities after it took steps in 2018 to minimize traffic enforcement and focus police attention on actions that posed more imminent safety risks. 

Rhodes sees the new limits on pretext stops as experimental. “Why not let departments be your laboratories, rather than issue an edict for all departments?” Rhodes asked. “Our plans are to take a long enough snapshot to see if this is helpful. If it is, great. If it isn’t, should it be tweaked, should it be thrown out, what are the next steps?” 

San Francisco’s plans

The data shows that Blacks in San Francisco have been overwhelmingly impacted by stops for minor code violations. And, more often than not, they are not cited — another indication that racial bias may be a factor in the stops, and that the traffic infraction was not the sole focus.  

In line with this conclusion, Black drivers are more likely to be searched or arrested after being stopped for a minor traffic infraction. 

For non-moving offenses, Black people were stopped

at over eight times the rate of white people.

% SF population vs % SF stops

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

Black

White

Hispanic

Other

Multiple

Asian

For non-moving offenses, Black

people were stopped at over eight

times the rate of white people.

Black

White

Hispanic

Asian

Other

Multiple

0

10

20

25

30

15

40

5

35

% SF population vs % SF stops

Chart by Will Jarrett. Data from 2018 to 2021, provided by the San Francisco Police Commission. Includes stops designated as equipment or non-moving offenses by officers. Race is the perceived race as determined by officers.

In SF, almost three-quarters of Black people were let

off with a warning or no action after a non-moving offense.

No action/warning

Citation

Arrest

Other

Black

Hispanic

White

Asian

In SF, almost three-quarters of Black

people were let off with a warning or no

action after a non-moving offense.

No action/warning

Citation

Arrest

Other

Black

Hispanic

White

Asian

Chart by Will Jarrett. Data from 2018 to 2021, provided by the San Francisco Police Commission. Includes stops designated as equipment or non-moving offenses by officers. Race is the perceived race as determined by officers.

To remedy the clear disparities, San Francisco’s draft plan would go further than Los Angeles’ in considering a ban on specific stops and language curtailing officers’ discretion to ask investigatory questions without cause. This combines the experiment of banning the stops commonly enforced on Black and Brown people, and making unwarranted searches more difficult to initiate. 

The combination is important. The policy in Virginia, for example, bans certain stops but does not prevent cops from investigating or searching drivers without cause once a stop is made for any other vehicle or traffic infractions. Data shows that overall stops in the state have been reduced but racial disparities have persisted.   

San Francisco Police Commission Vice President Max Carter-Oberstone says the outcome in Virginia indicates a need for both bans and language that restricts what some call “fishing expeditions” by police for criminal activity. 

“It bans stops for about 10ish, 12ish offenses, and that’s all it does. And if that’s all you do, then that’s not going to stop race disparities,” he said in a recent discussion with fellow commissioners. “That’s why our policy puts restrictions on investigative questions and consent searches, because that’s often the incentive to stop someone in the first instance.” 

The San Francisco Police Commission’s new traffic policy released this month takes into account the months of feedback it received from the community, SFPD members, reform advocates and researchers. 

It would prevent officers from initiating traffic stops for nine enumerated infractions. Whether to include this list of banned stops has been a source of conflict at numerous working-group meetings with members of the SFPD and police reform advocates. 

Implementing even just one of these limits — the list of specific stops or more general limits on pretext stops — can be effective, said Charlotte Resing, a government affairs manager with the Center for Policing Equity. She presented national findings on traffic enforcement policies before San Francisco’s Police Commission last month. 

“Something is better than nothing,” Resing said. “Either of these reforms on their own are likely to decrease volumes of stops, we’ve seen across the country that they do, and that decreases the burden on Black and Brown drivers and decreases the disparities in which they get pulled over.” 

When done in conjunction, she said, they can have an even bigger impact. 

Police department buy-in

Part of what makes reforms like banning pretext stops successful, though, is the department’s alignment with such a policy.  

In Fayetteville, Baumgartner said, the police chief’s directive and support from his command staff helped ensure the policy was effective.  

“If the police are reluctant or if it’s forced on them and they oppose it, they can find ways around it,” he  added, pointing to locales that began requiring police to get a driver’s signature of consent before searching their vehicle as an example. 

“Sometimes it was with the support of the police department, and sometimes it was over their dead body,” Baumgartner said. 

In Durham, North Carolina, he said the city council had pushed the new signature policy on the chief, and the rank-and-file found ways to “skirt around it.” A new chief who supported the policy came on board, and the frequency of consent searches dropped “dramatically,” Baumgartner said. 

In Los Angeles, Rhodes said the police chief and commission supported the limit on pretextual stops. And concerns from the police union were addressed during the policy drafting process; now, she said, union figures that have trained on the new policy support it, too. 

Here, the support from the SFPD’s leadership is mixed. 

Chief Bill Scott has said publicly that he supports a ban on pretextual stops that are racially motivated or otherwise biased. But he has stood fast against preventing officers from making specific low-level stops on specific code violations. 

“We have some fundamental disagreements about the list,” Commissioner Kevin Benedicto told Mission Local. 

Three commissioners met with Scott this week. On Wednesday, Commission President Cindy Elias removed the highly anticipated vote on the policy from the agenda, citing “additional perspectives that must be considered,” including feedback from Scott. It will be taken up again in January. 

Benedicto told Mission Local that Scott suggested language clarifications to the latest version of the policy, but that no major changes are expected, and that the commission is still committed to passing the policy as soon as possible. 

San Francisco’s police union hasn’t directly spoken out against ending pretextual stops, but some public-facing comments indicate which way the union may lean. 

During the first working group meeting about the traffic stop policy in August, union president Tracy McCray defended police traffic stops as stemming from law, not profiling. 

“Should we not stop people because they might be Black?” McCray asked the room. Bias, she said, could be reduced, but eliminating it — “not gonna happen.”