Sacramento police urged to end racial profiling

The police chief said the department isn’t racist.

McClatchy Newspapers

SACRAMENTO — Community leaders praised Sacramento on Friday for publicly releasing a report showing that black and Latino drivers are pulled over more often than whites and Asians.

Now they want the Sacramento Police Department to stop “racial profiling,” saying it creates a culture of fear and distrust that will impede the police from carrying out their mission of public safety.

The report found that though black and Latino motorists aren’t cited for violations more often than white or Asian drivers, they’re more frequently pulled over, asked out of their cars and searched.

“We are not a racist police department,” said Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel. “But based on this data, do we have issues? Yes.”

Possible solutions include better training of police officers, a more diverse force and greater interaction between police and communities of color to break down distrust and cultural barriers.

Data indicating Latinos are patted down at nearly 21‚Ñ2 times the rate of other motorists “is hurtful to the larger community because people are not going to call the police when something goes wrong,” said Joaquin Castaneda, chair of the California State University, Sacramento, chapter of Mecha, a Latino activist group.

Castaneda, 28, said he was pulled over in June “because there was a small light near my license plate that was out. Then they get deep into interrogation, they’re trying to figure out if you’re here legally.”

The report which cost the city $230,000 came as no surprise to Betty Williams, chairwoman of the Sacramento chapter of the NAACP, which gets about two dozen complaints a year of racial profiling by area police.

“It’s constant,” Williams said. “We need to find out why they’re doing it, and if we find out it’s more the new officers than those with five to 20 years experience that tells me there’s a lack of training when it comes to policing black people and Latinos.”

Patrol officers stopped black motorists 2.7 times more than would be expected based on the total number of drivers, the report said.

Beat cops made 54 percent of the stops during the study and accounted for nearly 64 percent of the stops of black motorists. Many are younger officers, and Braziel said the disparity in their stops of black drivers could be addressed through better training.

“Most of the stuff we do is very legitimate, and some of the stuff we do, innocent people get caught up in,” Braziel said, adding his department’s already addressed some of the report’s concerns.

Earlier this year, 192 police training officers, sergeants and management staff took part in racial sensitivity classes conducted by Lamberth Consulting of Pennsylvania, which authored the report.

More than 500 officers couldn’t take part in the training because of budget constraints, Braziel said.

The department will hold more frequent community meetings and collect more data on traffic stops.