Stop and frisk for driving: The case for banning racially biased traffic stops in Sacramento

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Black drivers made up 33% of all traffic  stops despite making up only 12% of the city's population. More than 70% of those  stops were for minor non-safety violations, things like broken tail lights, expired tags, or  tinted windows. Black drivers were 3.1 times more likely than white drivers to be stopped in the  city during the period that we reviewed data for.

[00:00:23]The ACLU argues those low-level violations are  often being used as a pretext to investigate unrelated crimes, even when the stop itself is not  tied to public safety. After looking at all of the data, Black and Latino drivers were respectively  two and 1.5 times more likely to be searched during all traffic stops than white drivers. State  law mandates police agencies across California to report this data. These are reports that are  coming directly from Sacramento PD to our State Department of Justice and we've just done the  analysis. It was a confirmation and affirmation of the experiences that many people of African  ancestry that Black people have experienced for years, decades, centuries. In fact, now the group  is now calling on Sacramento leaders to follow other California cities that have already adopted  policies limiting these kinds of low-level stops.