Our two Leagues in San Diego County have embarked on a study of the policing practices of the City of San Diego’s Police Department and the County Sheriff’s Office, along with some glimpses of Oceanside and Chula Vista. The topics are Police Discipline, Traffic Stops, Police Unions, Police in Schools and Surveillance with transparency a topic within all of those.
We will be coming to the members in April meetings with concurrence questions that we hope will lead us to a new (or additional) local position on Policing Practices.
We will publish in the Voters of the two Leagues the summaries of our five reports, with links to the entire reports. Last month we posted Police Discipline and Police Unions and this month we present Traffic Stops and Surveillance. In April we plan to have one more so that those intending on attending the virtual consensus meetings will have access to all of the reports and have read them prior to the meetings.
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Traffic Stops
Racial bias in policing in America goes back to a period shortly after the Revolutionary War, when White Southerners worried about rebellions among enslaved communities. But this report concentrates on 21st century data indicating a marked disparity in the number and outcome of traffic stops of White drivers and people of color. Studies from as early as 2014 reveal significant differences in the numbers and types of stops made by police of White drivers versus people of color, people with mental disabilities and other more vulnerable populations. Though there were indications of bias in these earlier studies, none of them were able to prove conclusively that police bias was the causal factor. The California legislature sought in 2016 to find a way to gather data that would more definitively answer the question of whether implicit bias is at play. With that goal in mind they passed the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Act, RIPA. The data they produced confirmed these disparities.
The New York Times, in two articles published in October of 2021, uncovered two additional key issues. The first is the reliance of many jurisdictions on fines and fees collected as a result of traffic stops to supplement their budgets, thus putting pressure on police officers to make an excessive number of traffic stops. The second speaks specifically to the kind of training police officers receive, which emphasizes the excessive danger police face in making traffic stops.
To cast light on the question of implicit bias, as well as to improve police training, RIPA has appointed a commission, called Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). POST has developed more detailed data collection forms that might help determine whether implicit bias is at play. They have also produced an impressive body of training materials which have been made available to police and sheriff’s departments in California. These include language modeling and role playing exercises designed to train officers to tone down their interactions with drivers, suggestions for improving encounters with the community, racial and identity profiling training, and suggestions for making officers more accountable. Police departments and sheriff’s offices are urged but not mandated to implement these resources.
It will be important to follow up with the San Diego PD and county sheriff’s departments to see how much of the training materials have actually been implemented and whether changes in collection data and training materials have brought about a change in behavior on the part of police as they continue to interact with the driving public. Follow-up on adherence to AB 846 will also be important.
Read the full report.
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Surveillance
Surveillance by the government has existed before our Constitution even existed. Our Founding Fathers expressed in the Bill of Rights the fear of government power over individual rights and privacy. Our First Amendments Rights of freedom of speech, assembly and religion along with the Fourth Amendment Rights against search and seizure are all threatened by overuse of surveillance. Surveillance was made easier by the necessary need for the government to keep track of its populations’ numbers, locations and needs. As the government helped more people (The New Deal, Medicare, etc.) more information was needed. Then as technology advanced and data-collecting became easier, even more information was gathered and could be used. Unfortunately, as this all increased, there were not always included laws and regulations that protected the rights of individuals nor were there always ways of citizen oversight to protect our constitutional rights.
San Diego, as both a military and border town, needs to be ever more vigilant that surveillance tools that are easily accessible are not overused. There is a delicate balance between the need to detect crimes and the need for privacy, which often favors the former when fear is heightened. There is also the issue of private businesses creating technology that is sold to government agencies with the main goal of profit rather than protecting individuals. Salesmanship may hide the lack of effectiveness of surveillance tools.We saw very little proof that the expectations of the technology met with their actual performance on some of these tools. We suggest that there be oversight, public awareness and data collected that would demonstrate to elected officials that any surveillance of the public is effective, cost-efficient and respectful of individual rights. We believe that we should always be failing on the side of less surveillance than more.
Read the full report.
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