Why S.F. might be about to prohibit police from making low-level traffic stops

FTA:

San Francisco police may soon be prohibited from stopping drivers for tinted windows, expired license plate tags and other low-level violations as part of a proposed policy overhaul intended to curb racially biased policing

What does race have to do with tinted windows and expired tags?!?

If $RACE_A stops following the law, should we stop enforcing that law, since it is "disproportionately" impacting $RACE_A ?!?

When will this madness end??

This is obviously lead to a safe utopia of diversity, inclusion and equity.

This is truly the city of zero accountability for everyone from local politicians to low level criminals - everything is someone else's fault.

So let me get this straight:

Step 1: Find any crime where the racial makeup of offenders of said crime deviate at all from racial makeup of the area.

Step 2: Prohibit the enforcement of said crime due to racially biased policing.

Step 3: Profit

Damn being a SFPD officer must be awesome, literally having zero responsibilities

If someone wants you to do something they make it easier for you to do it. If someone wants you to do less of something, they make it harder for you to do it.

San Francisco (the police oversight and regulatory apparatus, NOT the citizens) has made EVERYTHING difficult, long, arduous.

I wish they would make things easier so I could do more. But they continue to add paperwork, red tape, restrictions, redundant and pointless documentation to everyday and commonplace things.

So I have to prioritize being able to handle calls for service over everything else.

I'm late to the conversation, and 90% of the comments upvoted here are just nonsensical.

But do answer the question, Stanford actual tracks data (across the entire country) for how these low level stops are related to racial disparities.

The main metric they use is the "hit rate", which basically tracks what percentage of the time stops and searches on black vs. white populations actually yield something useful (like drug contraband or firearms). I was looking through the data, and notice a massive outlier:

San Francisco:

11 hits (per 100 searches) for black drivers

41 hits (per 100 searches) for white drivers

If racial bias wasn't a thing, those two numbers would be equal. As it stands, black drivers are heavily discriminated against in routing SFPD traffic stops. This is one of the worst outliers in the country.

So for all the smooth brains in this thread - that is why these offenses are "related to race". It's because SFPD uses them as an excuse to pull over and search / harass black drivers at a MUCH MUCH higher rate that white drivers (based on outcome).

I agree that policing needs to be better in SF (as does our DA), but enabling policies that are clearly being misused by the police for racial profiling is not the way to do it.

First off. I’ve been in the city for a long time and I have never seen a speeding ticket pull over. The city is essentially been doing this since the 90’s so idk why this is even a thing.