California’s 2024 Racial Identity and Profiling Act (RIPA) report is unprecedented in scale.
It analyzes more than 4.5 million stops by 560 law enforcement agencies across the state — almost 10 times last year’s participants.
The results support what many have voiced for a long time — that Black and brown Californians are stopped at higher rates than white Californians.
And although officers were more likely to search people they perceived to be Black or Latino, they were less likely to find anything illegal on them.
“It's time to move past the question of whether (racial profiling) exists,” said Alliance San Diego Executive Director Andrea Guerrero, who co-chairs the state RIPA board. “We’ve answered that question with voluminous data. It's time to answer the question of what we do about it.”
The disparity is greatest for Black individuals, who made up more than double the share of stops compared to their share of the population, and were searched more than one-and-a-half times as often as white individuals.
Officers searched and handcuffed at the highest rates people they perceived to be Native American.
The report found the problem extends to schools, where there are more law enforcement officers than there are nurses or counselors.
The board’s top recommendation to reduce these racial disparities is to end pretextual stops — when police stop someone for one thing and then ask them about something else.
“Repeated profiling and stopping of individuals, especially Black Californians, and asking them about whether they're on probation or parole to consent to a search, being handcuffed, being put in the back of a police car, being asked to sit on the curb — all resulting in no arrest, no citation, no anything — that all takes a toll, a psychological toll, and is a community harm, a public health harm,” Guerrero said.
Officers took action against transgender men and boys half the time they stopped them. But the report found that only a quarter of all stops resulted in any action.
The report found the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office spent almost $44 million in 2022 on enforcing traffic violations that didn’t result in any actions.
San Francisco and Los Angeles Police Departments and California Highway Patrol have already ended pretextual stops.
“It's time to move past the question of whether (racial profiling) exists. We’ve answered that question with voluminous data. It's time to answer the question of what we do about it.”Andrea Guerrero, Alliance San Diego executive director
San Diego County law enforcement agencies have yet to follow suit.
The board also recommends prohibiting field interviews and entries into any agency databases — including CalGang — in the absence of an arrest.
They also recommend adopting internal policies that prohibit law enforcement agencies and district attorneys from pursuing criminal charges for resisting arrest without any other citable offenses.
The report did note that the San Diego Police Department had the largest drop in the number of civilian complaints of any agency — from 203 complaints in 2021 to 124 complaints in 2022.
