SAN DIEGO
Duane Bennett was early in his legal career in 1985, working as a deputy district attorney in Riverside County, when he was pulled over and held at gunpoint by Los Angeles police officers.
Bennett, who is Black, said officers later told him that he “fit the description,” apparently of a suspect they were looking for. “I know what it means to be profiled and pretext (stopped).”
Bennett, who was hired as outside counsel for San Diego’s Commission on Police Practices, shared his own story Wednesday while giving the commission a 45-minute presentation on the history and legality of pretext stops, a controversial but legal tactic in which officers stop drivers or pedestrians for minor infractions as an excuse to search them or their vehicles in hopes of discovering more serious crimes. After the presentation, nearly two dozen community members addressed the commissioners and new San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl to share their own stories of pretext stops and racial profiling.
Chair Gloria Tran said the commission will take the testimony into consideration during its next meeting later this month when it decides how to move forward with potential recommendations to the Police Department on pretext stops. Similar community hearings are planned in the coming months to hear community testimony about the Police Department’s protest policies, de-escalation tactics and other topics.
Community members said pretext stops predominantly affect Black and Latino people, a claim supported by a 2021 study published in the Stanford Law Review. The study’s authors concluded that a Washington court decision that legalized pretext stops after they’d been banned in the state led to an “increase (in) the probability of racial profiling by police officers.”
A Black man who said he lives in southeastern San Diego told the commission Wednesday that a police officer earlier this year followed him for 20 blocks and then pulled him over, ostensibly because of a 6-inch strip of factory-installed tint along the top of the windshield of his new car. The man, whose name could not be confirmed before he left the meeting, said the officer immediately began asking if he had guns or drugs in the car.
“Then he begin to tell me that because I wouldn’t answer his questions, that I had to get out of the car,” the man said. “He took me out my car, put me in handcuffs (and) searched my car.”
Dave DeArman said his son, Christopher, was killed by officers during a pretext stop on Jan. 20, 2023, in Barrio Logan.
“The reason you’re getting pulled over is because your third brake light is out,” Officer Christopher Aguilar told DeArman, according to body-worn camera footage of the incident. Aguilar then asked DeArman why he had just been on nearby 17th Street, a spot the officer said is known for “narcotics and a bunch of bad stuff going on there.” Aguilar and his partner, Jacob Meyers, eventually told DeArman they had probable cause to search his truck and that they knew he had a history of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
“For a broken tail light?” DeArman asked the officers when they told him to get out of the truck. DeArman later fled the scene and exchanged gunfire with the officers, who fatally shot him. The county District Attorney’s Office announced last week that it had cleared Aguilar and Meyers of any wrongdoing.
Wahl, the new police chief, told the commissioners and community that he “will acknowledge that disparities exist.” He said that neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department is happy about those disparities.
“It’s clear we have a lot of work to do, and we have a long way to go to restore trust,” Wahl said. “I want you to know I’m committed to restoring trust … I realize that for a lot of you right now, that might not be good enough. And I acknowledge that … But it starts with listening and understanding where people are coming from.”
Wednesday’s meeting revived a yearslong effort in the city to address pretext stops. In 2019, the Citizens Advisory Board on Police/Community Relations submitted 30 recommendations to the Police Department that included a moratorium on such stops. It was a highly debated issue among members of the board, but police officials rejected the moratorium recommendation, writing in a response memo that the “benefit (of pretext stops) as an investigative tool is profound,” and that the moratorium on them would not be implemented “due to their overall usefulness in uncovering unlawful conduct.”
Two years later, Mayor Todd Gloria introduced 11 police reform measures and public safety priorities. No. 2 on his list: “Explore policies that would limit the use of pretextual stops and consent searches.”
Though the San Diego Police Department has updated the language of its procedure governing detentions and searches, it has not limited the ability of officers to make pretext stops like other agencies have done.
In 2022, the Los Angeles Police Department adopted a policy restricting the ability of officers to make pretext stops. Under the policy, officers cannot use minor violations as an excuse to investigate someone for more serious crimes unless the officers first have information to justify the stop. And when they do make such stops, the officers are required to record themselves on their body-worn cameras stating their reasons for suspecting a more serious crime has occurred.
A Los Angeles Times analysis of stop data from the first few months after the policy was implemented found it had its intended effect — officers stopped fewer people for minor violations, conducted fewer searches during those stops and were more successful in finding illegal items in those instances when they did conduct searches.
Last month, the Los Angeles City Council voted 13-0 to advance a plan that would end pretext stops for good, rather than just limiting them.
The most comprehensive study of pretext stops was conducted in Washington state, where a court decision changing the legality of such stops allowed experts to study and compare data from more than 8.25 million stops by Washington State Police officers both when pretext stops were allowed and when they were banned.
That Stanford Law Review study found that the 2012 court decision that allowed Washington officers to make pretext stops was “associated with a statistically significant increase in traffic stops of drivers of color relative to white drivers. Further, we find this increase in traffic stops of drivers of color is concentrated during daytime hours, when officers can more easily ascertain a driver’s race through visual observation.”
Several members of the community who spoke Wednesday suggested reforms that the commission can recommend to the city and the Police Department, including renewing the call for a moratorium on pretext stops.
“We will have actions out of tonight’s meeting,” Commissioner John Armantrout promised.
“A moratorium on pretext stops is something we should make happen,” Commissioner Christina Griffin-Jones said.
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