“We’ve done all of the reformist things,” countered
Cat Brooks, executive director of Justice Teams
Network and co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror
Project. “We’ve done trainings, we’ve done body
cameras, we’ve done police commissions, we’ve
hired from the community. All of these things
to tinker around the edges of this very large
problem, but really what we’ve been doing is
putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds.”
She said the report’s findings show the need for
a “complete transformation” from an emphasis
on police and prisons to one focused on
addressing root community causes such as
hunger and homelessness.
The report’s data is little changed from a year
ago when stops involving the state’s eight
largest agencies were studied for the second
half of 2018, before the death of George Floyd in
Minneapolis and other police killings of primarily
Black and Latino men sparked nationwide
protests and reform efforts last year.
It shows “there is significant work to be done to
prevent further disparities in who is stopped,
how they are treated when stopped, and the
outcomes of those stops,” the board said.
Black people make up 7% of the population
but were involved in 16% of California stops in
- Those perceived to be of Middle Eastern or
South Asian descent accounted for 5% of stops
and 2% of the population.
Whites and Latinos were one to two percentage
points less likely to be stopped than their
proportion of the population would indicate,
while those of Asian background account for
12% of the population and just 6% of stops.