The police cruisers had been trailing her for miles when the red and blue lights she’d been bracing for started flashing.
Geneviéve Jones-Wright guided her car to the roadside and instead of an officer at her window, she heard urgent shouts and orders from behind.
“Get out of the car! Put your keys on the roof! Put your hands up!”
Officers pointed their guns, and a crowd began to form.
Jones-Wright, then a deputy public defender for the County of San Diego, remembers asking several times why she was pulled over. When an officer said something about a stolen vehicle, she quickly explained the car was hers.
She was handcuffed anyway and put in the back of a police car, where she fought back panic. Officers used a police dog to search the inside of her car, then her trunk. It took officers 10 minutes to find her registration in the glovebox, verifying she was the legal owner.
Police later told Jones-Wright that when they checked her license plate, it did not match the make and model of her car, leading them to believe the vehicle may have been stolen. She wondered why they ran her plate in the first place.
Earlier that day, Jones-Wright had attended a memorial in Mission Beach for a fellow lawyer who had passed away — she was one of the few Black people in attendance. She and her colleagues left together, but the police followed her all the way home to southeastern San Diego.
“That situation is still sort of unbelievable to me,” Jones-Wright said of the encounter, which was five years ago. “When I got home, all I could do was cry. All I could do was sit in my driveway and cry.”
Geneviéve Jones-Wright, Community voices contributor
The experience may be familiar to many Black San Diegans and other people of color. For years, minorities and their advocates have called for local police departments to address the racial disparities that so often are endemic to policing — disparities many feel are fueled by bias.
Although law enforcement leaders have often rejected the idea that officers and deputies pull people over based on race, an analysis by The San Diego Union-Tribune shows notable discrepancies between Whites and minorities when it comes to police stops and searches.
Police and sheriff’s officials point to procedural and operational issues that account for some of these discrepancies.
The Union-Tribune analysis examined data for nearly 500,000 stops conducted by the two largest law enforcement agencies in the county — the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. Combined, the two agencies made contact with some 560,000 people.
Nearly 20 percent of the stops made by San Diego police officers from July 2018 through December 2020 involved Black people, who make up about 6 percent of the city’s population.
In one City Heights neighborhood, more than 30 percent of the people stopped were Black, even though Blacks account for less than 5 percent of the population there. One in five people stopped in Little Italy were Black, but less than 3 percent of Little Italy’s residents are Black.
In more than 90 percent of police beats throughout San Diego, Blacks were stopped at a higher rate per population than Whites, data show.
Police can cite a variety of reasons for initiating a stop, including witnessing a crime, consensual encounters, witnessing a traffic violation or having a reasonable suspicion that a crime occurred. The analysis found that the “reasonable suspicion” standard was cited by San Diego police to stop 60 percent of Black individuals.
For Native Americans, reasonable suspicion was cited in 70 percent of stops.
About 58 percent of White individuals were stopped for reasonable suspicion, though they were involved in a much larger proportion of total police encounters.
At the Sheriff’s Department, deputies said they had a reasonable suspicion for stopping 40 percent of the Blacks they encountered — the highest percentage of any racial group.
Nearly one in five encounters reported by both departments resulted in a search of a person or their property, the data showed.
Disproportionate searches
Among those who were searched, officers and deputies found illegal items almost 25 percent of the time.
This percentage is known as the search-yield rate, or hit rate — the proportion of people who are found with contraband or evidence of a crime out of the total number of people searched. Among other things, contraband can include stolen property or money, drugs, and firearms or other weapons.
According to the Union-Tribune analysis, both departments searched Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans at higher rates than White people. The Sheriff’s Department searched these minority groups more often, even though its data shows White people were more often to be found with contraband.
“All of this is driven by opinion, and (the officer’s) opinion of the situation,” said Joshua Chanin, a San Diego State University associate professor who studied local police stop data for a 2018 report. “And research shows a cop may view a situation differently when there’s a Black person involved, as opposed to a White person.”
Image from body-worn camera video of a San Diego police officer during the June 2019 arrest of Buddie Nichols, who fell unconscious and died.
(Image provided by San Diego County District Attorney’s Office)
Data show sheriff’s deputies searched 32 percent of the Native Americans they stopped, the highest rate among all races and more than one and a half times as high as the search rate of White people, who were searched 19 percent of the time.
Sheriff’s Department officials said those numbers are distorted by its obligation to investigate crimes on reservations.
Nearly one in four Black people were searched by sheriff deputies, the analysis found, again a measurably higher rate than for Whites.
The frequency of searches among White people is pertinent because sheriff data show they were found with contraband slightly more often — and with serious contraband at notably higher rates.
Deputies found illegal items after searching White people about 25 percent of the time, a higher rate than the 23 percent reported for Native Americans and 22 percent for Latinos and Blacks.
Of the 3,600 people who were found in possession of more serious items like drugs, firearms or other weapons, nearly 60 percent were White, according to sheriff’s data, about 30 percent were Hispanic and 8 percent were Black.
Asst. Sheriff Dave Brown said the department’s relationship with local Native American tribes contributes to that group’s stop-and-search results.
California law requires deputies to investigate all state violations committed on reservations, even if tribal police departments have already responded — an obligation that Brown said inflates those numbers.
All 18 of the county’s federally recognized tribal reservations fall within the sheriff’s jurisdiction, he added, and only two have the authority to transport and book prisoners into county jail.
That additional responsibility also boosts the sheriff deputies’ search numbers, Brown said, because deputies are required to conduct a search whenever they take custody of a person from another agency.
“This combination of circumstances skews the data since many of these people are already detained or under arrest when we technically ‘stop’ them,” he said.
Brown declined to address findings related to deputy interactions involving Black individuals.
1 in 4 Blacks searched
The San Diego Police Department faces similar challenges.
Police Capt. Jeffrey Jordon said agency data is skewed because individuals stopped by city lifeguards or San Diego Metropolitan Transit System officers who are later turned over to police must be recorded as a separate encounter by San Diego officers.
Reporting requirements affect the findings in other ways as well, Jordon said. People who are taken into custody for mental-health issues, for example, are categorized under stops made with reasonable suspicion even though officers don’t consider mental illness a crime.
Other circumstances also increase someone’s likelihood of coming into contact with a police officer, Jordan said. Although Black people account for 6 percent of the city’s population, for example, they account for 21 percent of the city’s homeless population, according to the county’s latest homeless count.
Jordon cited the East Village community, where homelessness is concentrated and police stops are more common than in other areas.
“Is that a bias that drives officers to go there and contact people, or is there a situation that’s happening in that space that drives officers to go to those places?” he asked.
San Diego police searched one in four Blacks and Native Americans they stopped — rates that are about 1.3 times higher than the rate at which Whites were searched.
However, unlike at the Sheriff’s Department, where a greater percentage of Whites were found with contraband, San Diego officers found illegal property after searching Blacks and Native Americans slightly more often than when they searched White people.
San Diego police data show about 24 percent of searched Whites and Latinos were found with contraband. The rate was about 27 percent among Blacks and 26 percent among Native Americans.
The searches analyzed by the Union-Tribune include both discretionary and non-discretionary actions.
Non-discretionary searches are often required under department policy or state law and include those made during arrests or when officers execute a warrant.
San Diego Police Department officers make a traffic stop along El Cajon Boulevard on June 23, 2020 in San Diego, California.
(Sam Hodgson / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Other searches are conducted when officers suspect there is reason to do so, like when they smell drugs or think they see a weapon. These are called discretionary searches.
If both a discretionary and non-discretionary reason for a search was listed, the Union-Tribune categorized the search as non-discretionary for its analysis.
Experts note the latitude given to peace officers.
“There will always be bias in who an officer feels threatened by, where they may feel threatened,” said Chanin, the SDSU professor. “Are they in a more dangerous neighborhood? Is it light or dark outside? All of those factors will influence whether or not they feel threatened and whether or not the person involved in the stop is deemed as suspicious or not.”
San Diego police data show that nearly half of the 21,200 searches of Black individuals were discretionary, more than any other race. Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans were all inspected at higher rates than Whites when an officer had the discretion to choose whether or not a search should take place.
Between 41 and 46 percent of searches involving those minority groups were discretionary, compared to about 40 percent of searches of White People.
Police have the most discretion during so-called consent searches — when an officer doesn’t witness any criminal conduct but asks to search a person, vehicle or residence anyway.
In these situations, individuals have the right to decline a search request, although experts say many agree to the searches because they do not know their rights. About 6 percent of the 88,800 searches conducted by San Diego police were solely consensual searches.
More than 40 percent of the people San Diego police sought permission to search were Latino, a higher percentage than Whites, even though searched Whites and Latinos were found with contraband at the same rate.
‘No progress made’
Nancy Maldonado, president and the CEO of the Chicano Federation, said the Latino advocacy organization was founded more than five decades ago in part to stand up against racial bias in policing. She said the disparities persisting today are disheartening.
“The data has continued to solidify what we as a community have long known to be true,” Maldonado said. “It feels like there has been no progress made. We are still fighting against the same issues 52 years later.”
Overall, sheriff’s deputies performed consent searches much more often than San Diego Police officers. Data show consent was the sole reason for nearly one in five of the 24,000 deputy searches.
Of those 4,300 consensual searches, more than half involved Whites, more than any other race. One in three were Hispanic and about 10 percent were Black.
Stop-and-search rates are regularly used by researchers and law enforcement agencies to identify disparities and potential bias within policing.
Experts acknowledge that disparities alone do not necessarily establish deputy or officer bias, but the fact that minorities are searched more often, despite evidence that shows they are less likely to be found with things like drugs or guns, raises serious questions.
“It is a strong signal that that group is being subjected to a higher threshold of suspicion in order to be searched,” said Jack Glaser, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on racial profiling. “In other words, groups that have lower yield rates are probably being searched in part because of their group membership — race or ethnicity — which is not a reliable indicator of offending.”
Community leaders said the findings underscore the fear and mistrust that many people of color feel when they cross paths with police or sheriff’s deputies.
Jones-Wright left the Public Defender’s Office and ran for district attorney in 2018. She now runs a social-justice organization called Community Advocates for Just and Moral Governance.
The experiences of too many Blacks and other minorities in San Diego County have been written off as anecdotal and not reflective of how police and sheriff’s deputies generally treat people of color, Jones-Wright said. Even when confronted with statistical evidence of deep disparities, she said, law enforcement officials are slow to respond.
“It’s hurtful,” she said. “Because they couldn’t take our word for it, and now they have the numbers to back it up and they’re still not doing anything.”
For data and further methodology details, go to https://github.com/sdut-datadesk