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Focus: Study: Black and Hispanic drivers more likely to be searched when stopped by San Diego police

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A long-awaited independent analysis of traffic stops by San Diego police shows that race and ethnicity isn’t a significant factor in determining who police pull over, but blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be searched and questioned in the field after being stopped.

The 140-page report by San Diego State University researchers, based on nearly 260,000 traffic stops in 2014 and 2015, concludes that different treatment of blacks and Hispanics contributes to tension between minority communities and the Police Department.

The report, released Wednesday, suggests several changes to department policy, training procedures and data collection that city officials said they have already made or intend to make quickly.

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Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman said in an interview she is optimistic enhanced officer training is already making a difference in police relations with the city’s minority communities and has helped contribute to race and ethnicity not being a factor in who gets pulled over.

“I believe that virtually all of our officers do the right thing, for the right reasons, in a very caring, compassionate and empathetic manner,” Zimmerman said.

She also cautioned against overemphasizing statistics.

“Statistics are a great piece of evidence, but not the only piece of evidence,” she said. “They don’t necessarily tell the entire story.”

Zimmerman acknowledged, however, that there remains a perception in parts of the community that minorities are more likely to be pulled over and mistreated by police after getting stopped.

“We hear from some community members, not all, that they believe we pull some people over at a higher rate,” she said. “That’s why we need to continue having an open and honest dialogue to build trust.”

Councilwoman Marti Emerald, who has lobbied for the release of the report for months, said it was a call to action for the city.

“There’s enough there to say the training needs to change, the culture needs to change and we’ve got some work to do to satisfy some very legitimate concerns in our minority communities,” Emerald said. “The report shows there are real disparities, and the community is justified in feeling that police are targeting black drivers. They’re treated very differently. They’re pulled out of the car and they’re searched.”

The report comes at a time when racial profiling and mistreatment of people of color by police has prompted violence, civil unrest and passionate debate in many places across the nation, including San Diego.

The analysis compared traffic stops during night hours, when police can’t tell the race of drivers due to darkness, to traffic stops during daylight hours, when police can tell the race of drivers. That allowed them to gauge the difference.

Only stops for equipment and moving violations were included, not stops prompted by searches for a suspect in a crime or stops in conjunction with code enforcement efforts.

The data show that while blacks were pulled over more than whites in 2014, based on their population, the disparity disappeared in 2015 and wasn’t statistically significant when the two years were analyzed together.

But when individual divisions of the Police Department were analyzed over the two-year period, officers in the Northeastern Division, which includes Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Peñasquitos, Mira Mesa and Scripps Ranch, pulled over blacks and Hispanics more than whites.

In contrast, officers working in neighborhoods south of Interstate 8, which are more racially and ethnically diverse, were more likely to pull over whites than blacks or Hispanics.

Across the city, there was no statistically significant difference by race in the arrest rates for people pulled over, according to the report.

And while blacks and Hispanics were searched more than whites throughout the city, they were less likely than whites to be found with contraband or illegal items, the study said.

In addition, blacks were less likely than whites to receive citations when researchers compared drivers who were stopped under similar circumstances.

City officials and community leaders have been lobbying for the traffic stop report’s release for months. The public has previously only had access to some of the findings as described by SDSU researchers, not the full range of data those findings are based on.

The release of the full report was delayed partly because city officials had concerns with earlier drafts they received, said Ron Villa, the city’s deputy chief operating officer.

“We met with the researchers several times to gain an understanding and clarity on where they were coming from,” Villa said.

He said the city wasn’t trying to quash a negative assessment of its police force. “We never requested that they change their findings, and they didn’t,” Villa said.

Joshua Chanin, the lead researcher for the SDSU report, did not return a phone message and an email on Wednesday.

Villa said the goal was to make the report clearer, more user-friendly for the public and more accurate.

An 11-page letter city officials sent last week to the SDSU researchers focused on many concerns, most notably conclusions from data disparities that city officials characterized as insignificant.

Villa said city officials are pleased with the final version of the report, which cost $62,500.

“We wanted to maintain the objectivity of the researchers, so there was no action to identify that they needed to change this or that finding,” he said. “The final report incorporates a lot of the things that we requested. We paid for this report, so we wanted to make sure that the taxpayers got a meaningful report, and it’s a quality product.”

Villa said releasing the report on the day before Thanksgiving, when some city officials and community leaders who have been clamoring for the findings would be unavailable to comment, was not an attempt to limit the attention the document gets.

“We got the report (Tuesday) night, and we wanted to stand by our commitment to release it as soon as possible,” Villa said.

He added that city officials wanted to give the public as much time as possible to digest the analysis before next Wednesday, when the City Council’s Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee is scheduled to discuss it.

Councilwoman Emerald, the chair of that committee, said the timing of the report’s release was frustrating.

“We get this a lot — things dumped in the afternoon before a weekend or a holiday when people are heading out of the office and just after they’ve checked their emails for the last time of the day,” she said, suggesting that Mayor Kevin Faulconer wanted to minimize comment on the report and control discussion of it.

Faulconer declined to be interviewed but released this statement: “I strongly believe that community relationships and public safety go hand in hand. The stronger the community partnerships are, the more successful our Police Department will be at keeping our neighborhoods safe. This is why we’re continuing to move forward to implement the recommendations in this report.”

Emerald said she was grateful that Faulconer’s staffers kept their promise to release the report before Thanksgiving and soon enough so that community leaders can analyze it before Wednesday’s committee debate.

“The most important thing was to have everybody who has a stake in this read the entire report, go through it line by line, and understand the science of it and how the researchers arrived at their conclusions,” she said.

Andre Branch, president of the San Diego chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that although he had not had a chance to read through the entire report, the findings that were shared with him were alarming.

Particularly troubling, he said, was that police were more likely to search black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers, which indicated to him that better training is still needed so that these populations aren’t subjected to “unreasonable searches” that lead to nothing.

“They seem to be looking for something under the assumption that there must be something illegal going on,” Branch said.

The Rev. Shane Harris, president of the National Action Network San Diego, said the study’s findings show how police interactions with blacks and Hispanics after a traffic stop align with what he has seen and heard in the community.

“The response from police is more likely to be intrusive,” Harris said, adding that some police officers might be more “uncomfortable” when confronting a person of color in the field.

He commended the city’s political leaders for requesting the study and understanding a need for data to verify (or contradict) public perceptions. But he explained that while the study provides some of that data, it doesn’t adequately address a broader problem of harassment by police.

“Just because they didn’t arrest me doesn’t mean it gave them a right to harass me,” Harris said.

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has urged the city for months to release the report, declined to comment.

A spokeswoman said the report was too much to digest quickly, but that ACLU officials plan to thoroughly analyze it before next week’s City Council committee meeting.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick

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