1. “Lawsuit Accuses Beverly Hills Police Of Racially Profiling [Nearly 1,100] Black Drivers.”
That’s the headline from an NBC News report on a new lawsuit that accuses Beverly Hills Police “of racially profiling nearly 1,100 Black people during traffic stops” over a two year period, between 2019-2021. Ben Crump, one of the lawyers representing the victims in the case, noted that just two of these motorists were convicted of crimes, illustrating that the goal of these stops “wasn’t to deter crime. It was to send a message to Black people that we don’t want your kind around here.”
The lawsuit, obtained by Protect and Serve, highlights the accounts of several of these motorists including Jasmine Williams and Juwan White, who Beverly Hills Police Department officers stopped while they were riding a scooter during their vacation to the city. The lawsuit alleges:
“Even after Williams and White provided their identification, [officers] handcuffed and placed [the pair] under arrest on multiple fabricated charges. Before being handcuffed, Williams was pushed, hit or struck by a male officer. White was grabbed and threatened with being tased. Williams and White were also charged with riding roller skates on the sidewalk. They were not on roller skates but the Municipal Code did not mention a scooter, so the officer lied about the actions, changing a scooter to roller skates. After prosecutors reviewed the (fabricated) police reports and the incident, all charges against Williams and White were dropped.”
NBC News also highlighted the accounts of two other Black motorists who are suing the city:
“Shepherd York, clerk at a Beverly Hills law office, [was stopped] on his way to work one morning. ‘I spent three days in jail, humiliated, scared, sad.’ Police stopped him … because his license plates were expired, he was patted down, his car searched and impounded—but then he was never convicted of a crime.”
…
“Lakisha Swift was pulled over for allegedly being three inches past the line at a red light. She says she was detained for 20 minutes and handcuffed. ‘They arrested my boyfriend. They took him to jail for three days.’ Her attorney says her boyfriend was taken into custody for an outstanding warrant, but it turned out to be a mistake. ‘I was stopped just for being Black while driving in Beverly Hills.’”
This is not the first time the Beverly Hills Police Department has been accused of racial profiling over the past few years:
A 2021 lawsuit alleged that a special Rodeo Drive “Safe Streets” task force were “unjustly stopping and arresting Black civilians who were roller skating, scootering, driving and jaywalking a few feet outside the crosswalk,” The Guardian reported. During an 18 month period reviewed in the lawsuit, the special unit arrested 106 people—105 of them were Black or Latino.
Disgraced former Beverly Hills Police Chief Sandra Spagnoli resigned in 2020, “marking the end of a rocky tenure that saw the city pay out millions to settle lawsuits alleging that she had made racist remarks to subordinate officers…” That same year, Salehe Bembury—the Vice President of Versace, who is Black—exited his company’s store in Beverly Hills carrying a bag with a pair of shoes that he designed himself, when he was stopped by two officers who said he was jaywalking. The officer detained Bembury, forced him to place his arms behind his back, spread his feet and searched him. Bembury recorded the encounter and posted it to social media, writing, “Beverly Hills While Black.”
Beverly Hills is just the latest example of pervasive racial disparities in traffic stops—including those caused by clear racial bias—that exist within police departments in California and across the country. For example:
Racist text message scandal in Antioch (CA). Protect and Serve recently covered the Antioch Police Department text message scandal—which included text messages between police officers admitting “I'm only stopping them [motorists] cuz they black,” referring to George Floyd as “that Guerilla who died,” and engaging in joking and joyous celebration after shooting an unarmed Black civilian in the neck—, which investigators said “demonstrates their racial bias and animus towards African Americans and other people of color in the community.”
Data Shows Police Disproportionately Stop Black Drivers In Houston (TX). The Texas Civil Rights Project released a new report this week revealing significant racial disparities in non-moving traffic stops conducted by the Houston Police Department. As Lucio Vasquez reports for Houston Public Media:
“The report analyzed 2022 traffic stop data from the Houston Police Department and found that police pulled over 81,026 people specifically for non-moving traffic violations, like driving with an expired registration sticker. The report found that Houston’s Black drivers accounted for nearly 42% of these stops — despite the fact that about 23% of Houston's population is Black, according to census data … The report also found that Black drivers made up nearly 60% of the 2,733 arrests that occurred after these stops."
For Every Five Motorists This Raleigh (NC) Police Officer Pulls Over, Four Are Black. Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court considered a racial-discrimination-based challenge to a conviction in a case involving a single Raleigh, North Carolina police officer who “had stopped 299 drivers, 245 of whom were black (about 82%)”. Writing for the dissent, Chief Justice Anita Earls noted that while this specific police officer’s pattern of stops is atrocious, the data shows that the Raleigh Police Department generally has a troubling track record of racially disparate stops: “Out of all Raleigh Police Department traffic stops since 2002 (nearly one million stops), 46% were of black drivers” despite the fact that Raleigh’s Black population represents just 28% of the city’s overall population.
Zooming Out:
Researchers from Stanford University recently published the largest-ever study of alleged incidents of racial profiling during traffic stops by police nationally. The study, which is published in Nature, examined “nearly 100 million traffic stops across the country” and found that “Black drivers were, on average, stopped more often than white drivers.” Moreover, once stopped, Black drivers were searched nearly twice as often as white drivers even though Black drivers were less likely than white motorists to be carrying drugs, guns or other illegal contraband.
Similarly, a recent California-specific study, published by the Public Policy Institute of California, reviewed “data on 3.4 million traffic stops made in 2019 by California’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies” and found that “Black drivers are overrepresented in traffic stops throughout the day… but the disparity is especially stark in stops made by police departments in the few hours before and after midnight.” Similarly to the findings in the national study, the researchers also found that in California, “Black and Latino drivers are notably more likely to be stopped for a traffic violation that does not result in any enforcement or discovery of contraband or evidence.”
How are cities and police departments tackling these racial disparities in traffic stops? Unfortunately, the research doesn’t support the effectiveness of much-hyped interventions such as implicit bias training for police officers. Indeed, the most rigorous study—published in Psychological Science earlier this year—found that “[o]fficers who took the training were more knowledgeable about bias and more motivated to address bias at work, [however] these effects were fleeting and appear to have little influence on actual policing behaviors just one month after the training session.” Counter-intuitively, the best way to reduce racial disparities isn’t to focus on the behavior of individual officers, but rather to engage in broader policy change. For example:
Cities Such As Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco—and all of Virginia—Have Removed The Burden From Police Officers of Conducting Most Non-Safety Related Traffic Stops. Rather than focusing on how to reduce disparities directly, a growing number of cities are questioning why police officers are forced to spend time making minor traffic stops for infractions such as driving with a burned out taillight or with an air freshener hanging from the mirror. Last year, Safer Cities Research conducted a national poll to determine voters’ views on traffic laws and found that nearly 3-in-4 voters support banning traffic stops for minor offenses that pose no imminent safety risk like broken tail lights and outdated registration. Moreover, there is evidence that these kinds of shifts provide more safety benefits in addition to reduced racial disparities. Here are two examples:
Philadelphia Law Reducing Disparate Traffic Stops While Taking More Guns Off The Street. As CBS News in Philadelphia reports:
“[In the] one year since Philadelphia enacted its Driving Equality Law, [which] bans officers from pulling people over for minor traffic violations like a missing inspection sticker, broken lights or something hanging from the rear-view mirror, [n]ew data shows Philadelphia's Driving Equality Law is helping to take more weapons off the streets. The law bans specific traffic stops for minor violations like having a tail light out. [Philadelphia City Council Member Andre] Thomas says refocusing officers' attention helps police take more guns off the streets with fewer stops. According to the councilman's data, in 2019, officers recovered 318 guns from 215,00 traffic stops. But after the Driving Equality Law was implemented, police recovered 346 guns from 64,000 traffic stops.”
After Fayetteville (NC) Police Chief Reprioritized Traffic Stops, Disparities Decreased While Traffic Fatalities Also Plummeted. The New York Times recently quoted the experience of one North Carolina Police Department after the now-retired police chief unilaterally decided to reprioritize police traffic stops:
“Harold Medlock, the now-retired police chief of Fayetteville, N.C., told his officers to quit stopping cars for expired registrations or equipment violations to focus on speeding, reckless driving and other more dangerous infractions.
In 2016, the year he retired, the Fayetteville police made more than 50 percent more stops than in the year before he took over — and mainly for those hazardous infractions. But although the police were stopping more cars, they searched far fewer Black drivers or passengers — a third of the number they had searched in 2012, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
The same data showed that traffic fatalities, the police use of force and citizen complaints about the police all declined during that time — while predictions of an explosion in gun and drug crimes never came to pass.
“Everything good that could happen, did happen,” recalled Mr. Medlock, the former chief.”
Marijuana Legalization Helps Mitigate Racial Disparities In Traffic Stops. The researchers in the aforementioned national study of traffic stops also examined policing patterns following the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington and found that the policy shift “reduced [overall] search rates [during traffic stops] for white, Black and Hispanic drivers”; and, “because Black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to be searched before legalization, the policy change reduced the absolute gap in search rates between race groups.”
2. “Police Union Leader Said Woman Killed By Seattle Officer ‘Had Limited Value’.”
In major cities across the country, police union leaders have a large megaphone, which provides them with both the ability to advocate for better wages and working conditions for police officers and to provide an opportunity to strengthen bonds of trust between police officers and the communities that they serve. Unfortunately, though, this megaphone comes with a microscope, too—and when police union leaders use their platform to disparage rather than lift up, they can both break the bonds of community trust and create a political environment that is less favorable to the officers they serve. Two classic examples of this behavior include:
Chicago Police Union President Defends January 6th Riots In Which A Police Officer Was Killed. In the days after the January 6th riots, during which five people died—including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick—Chicago Police Union President John Catanzara publicly minimized the attacks—“There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property … It was a bunch of pissed-off people that feel an election was stolen, somehow, some way … If the worst crime here is trespassing, so be it. But to call these people treasonous is beyond ridiculous and ignorant.”
NYC Police Union Leader Floats The Term “Blue Racism.” Following the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Edward Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association in New York City “released a video claiming that police officers are the frequent victims of discrimination, or what the brief four-minute clip called ‘Blue Racism.’ As the New York Times reported, the comments “prompted a spirited backlash pillorying the notion that police officers are members of a racial group...”
And now we can add Seattle Police Union leadership to that list. For The Guardian, Sam Levin reports on the outrage that has erupted over Seattle Police Officer Dailen Auderer—vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild—who was caught on bodycam saying that a young woman struck and killed by a police cruiser while crossing the street “had limited value” and that the city “should just write a check.” As Levin reports:
“Auderer responded to the scene of a 23 January crash where another Seattle police officer, Kevin Dave, had struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old graduate student, on a crosswalk. Dave was driving 74 mph on the way to an overdose call in an area where the speed limit was 25 mph. Kandula was thrown more than 100 feet and died that night… Auderer is a drug-recognition expert and was called to evaluate whether Dave was impaired.”
While driving away, Auderer’s bodycam recorded a phone call he made to Seattle police union president Mike Solan. The Seattle Police Department released the footage last week, which captured Auderer’s disturbing statements—and laughter—during the conversation:
“...I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, flew off the car—but she is dead [Auderer is heard laughing]. No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, just write a check [Auderer is heard laughing], $11,000, she was 26 anyway, she had limited value…”
The good news is that rank and file police officers can vote out toxic union leaders. And, there are some early signs that the tide could be turning on toxic police union leadership. For instance, as the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reports, last year, in Saint Louis, “The St. Louis police union’s often controversial business manager announced his exit from the organization ….
“Jeff Roorda is leaving after nearly 12 years with the St. Louis Police Officers Association. [He] gained notoriety during and after protests in Ferguson following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown. He wore an ‘I am Darren Wilson’ wristband at a meeting of a proposed civilian oversight board in support of the officer who killed Brown. He also wrote ‘Ferghanistan: The War on Police,’ which featured exclusive, sympathetic interviews with Wilson.”
Even in Chicago, where John Catanzara—who once said Muslims are “savages [and] they all deserve a bullet”—reigns over the police union with an iron fist, a challenger emerged last year that nearly dethroned him, who ran on a platform that focused on the damage that Cantanzara’s rhetoric has caused rank and file officers. Bob Bartlett, the challenger who narrowly lost the union election, said of Cantanzara: “He has eroded every group of people he is involved with. Our state legislators. People at City Hall. City Council. Yelling at aldermen who are our friends. It’s gotten so bad that legislators won’t work with him to get stuff done in Springfield.”
3. “Nearly Five Years After Pleading Guilty To A Felony, A Chicago Cop Remains On The Force.”
As Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ, Officer “Joseph DeRosa pleaded guilty to resisting and obstructing police [after a “drunken meltdown at a casino” where he told casino staffers to “suck my dick”, repeatedly called a female police officer “hun” even after she asked him not to do so, and “kicked a Michigan [police] officer in the face”]. The felony conviction is supposed to bar him from being a police officer in Illinois …. But it took 20 months for the Chicago Police Department to send notice of the felony conviction—notice required under the law—to the agency in charge of decertifying police officers (the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board). Next it took the city’s Law Department another 31 months to move to fire DeRosa. Even today, the city’s Police Board has yet to schedule an evidentiary hearing on the dismissal charges.” So, Officer DeRosa remains on the force.
This is an extreme example of a pervasive trend: It is incredibly difficult to rid a department of a problematic police officer. The Baltimore Sun reported on how a Baltimore police officer who was “caught fabricating evidence” and “convicted [for doing so] remains on force 2½ years later.” And, Cal Matters and the San Jose Mercury News partnered on an investigative report, which found that “more than 80 law enforcement officers working today in California are convicted criminals, with rap sheets that include everything from animal cruelty to manslaughter.”
Daniel Oates, the former chief of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division who later served as the police chief in three cities—Ann Arbor (MI), Aurora (CO), and Miami Beach (FL)—penned an op-ed in The Washington Post that argues that “police unions’ [use their] immense power” to block the discipline—and especially firing—of problematic police officers. One step towards solving the problem, according to Chief Oates, is to “empower our police chiefs to hold cops accountable.” Here’s more from Oates:
“Police chiefs have been fighting this lonely battle for years [against police unions and the “insidious cost of union intransigence”]... From our experience, we know there cannot be true reform unless Americans elect politicians willing to take on obstructionist [police union] leaders… You also realize that the union is superb at lobbying over your head to elected officials…. Instead of fighting crime or building community trust, you’re huddled with lawyers, practicing testimony, memorizing evidence. You’re also weighing the likely outcomes of battling the union. Win [the battle] and your ethical standard is upheld for all your cops to see. Lose, and the union will trash your integrity and leadership… You learn there are only so many fights to take on…”