On the Road to Fresno, Sharing Data with Community
This fall, Catalyst California researchers joined our partners at Fresno BHC for an in-person presentation to the community of a preliminary analysis of traffic stops by Fresno Police.
The data, presented by members of our Research and Data Analysis and Equity in Community Investments teams, showed that Fresno officers stop people, especially men of color, with disproportionate frequency compared to White people, and that officers spend most of their time on traffic enforcement that does not make the community safer.
“There’s a lot that worries me about what’s going on and about the conduct of the police,” said Mari Bundy de Soto, a Fresno resident. “I don’t believe, in my opinion, that the police are doing a good job.”
The meeting in Fresno attracted a full house: residents asked questions and participated in activities to define what a more equitable community safety vision can look like.
Community members also told their own stories of interactions with Fresno Police during traffic stops. One older Latinx resident recounted how officers recently stopped him and his wife as they returned home from an evening event. They approached him with guns drawn before even asking for his driver's license, though he was not speeding and obeyed all commands. Other residents complained of slow police response to residents’ calls reporting thefts and other offenses—and their impression that enforcement is selective.
These stories will add qualitative information to Catalyst California’s final report on Fresno police traffic stops. The quantitative data analysis occurred thanks to the California Department of Justice release last year of comprehensive data about police stops across the state.
The data release was a direct mandate of The Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (AB 953), which required phased gathering of this information by certain police agencies beginning in 2018 and extended to all agencies in California (more than 500) by 2022. During every stop, officers must collect information that includes the circumstances of the interaction and the perceived identity characteristics of the people they stop.
Traffic stops are a distinct vector of police racial profiling in California, according to the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory (RIPA) Board annual report released in January. It found police stopped Black drivers “more frequently than expected” compared to their proportion of the population.
Looking at more than 4.5 million stops across the state during 2022, the report concluded that 12.5 percent of traffic stops in California involved drivers perceived by officers as Black, but Black people only represent about 5.4 percent of the state’s population. Catalyst California conducted its own analyses of the data for Los Angeles County, Riverside County, Sacramento County, and the City of Long Beach, as well as the entire state. The Fresno analysis is a closer look at data from this local area, informed by residents’ lived experiences.
Stay tuned for the finalized Fresno report, set for release in January. We also invite you to take a look at RACE COUNTS, our data-driven initiative that uses race as the primary lens to understand inequity in California, where traffic stops data constitute a new indicator.