San Francisco police officers have mostly stopped pulling drivers over for minor violations like expired tags, dangling air fresheners and broken taillights, and are using force against fewer drivers, according to a new report released Wednesday.
The fall in traffic stops, which comes after a 2024 policy change, came without any noticeable impact on crime or the number of weapons seized, the report also found. But Black drivers are still stopped for minor reasons far more often than white drivers. Though they make up 5 percent of San Francisco’s driving-age population, Black drivers were 15 percent of those stopped by police.
The report looked at traffic stop data before and after a 2024 policy that required officers to stop making “pretextual traffic stops,” in which police question drivers for minor violations like defective lights or recently expired registration. Instead, officers were required to only pull people over if they saw other infractions or crimes, like running a red light or speeding.
Before the change, 13 percent of San Francisco Police Department traffic stops were for “pretextual” reasons subsequently restricted by the department. By 2025, that share fell to 5.2 percent, about three stops a day.
The report, put together by the Center for Policing Equity for traffic stop data from 2018 to 2025, also showed police officers used force against drivers in traffic stops less. But the results are limited because the number of incidents is small: Police officers used force in traffic stops fewer than 100 times per year since 2020.
Still, the report found banning pretext stops coincided with a 44 percent reduction in officers using force against Black drivers. That drop was 51 percent for Latino drivers.
Notably, after police union resistance to ending pretextual stops over claims that the policy would jeopardize their ability to keep “dangerous criminals” off the streets, that has not happened: Crime was down almost 44 percent from 2023 to 2025.
“This idea that pretext stops help crime go down – the data just doesn’t support that,” added Matthew Graham, senior data analyst with Center for Policing Equity and an author of the report.
Traffic stops turned up few guns either way: Officers recovered 17 firearms in 2024 and 16 in 2025, “about the same as the numbers in 2022 and 2023” and down from 78 in 2019. “Because traffic stops yield so few firearm and weapon seizures, reducing pretextual stops is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on weapon-based crime,” the report read.
The report authors do suggest the city do further study, however: They found that a catch-all category, “Local Ordinance Violation,” rose from 336 incidents in 2023 to 1,982 in 2025. They suggest officers may be using the category in place of the now-restricted reasons, and recommend a city audit.
Brian Cox, the police accountability lead at the public defender’s office who pushed for the changes, said the results show the end of pretext traffic stops did not worsen public safety.
“We can reduce inefficient police contact with the public while maintaining the level of service that people in San Francisco have come to expect,” Cox said.
The changes to traffic stops came after years of pressure. A 2021 investigation by the New York Times found that police nationwide had killed over 400 people in their cars, who did not have weapons or were speeding, in the prior five years. In San Francisco, numerous reports found that stops disproportionately affected non-white drivers.
The San Francisco police union, however, fought the changes. It stalled a proposed policy for over a year and claimed it “unlawfully imposes restrictions” on what police officers can do. When the policy came into effect in July 2024, the union unsuccessfully sued.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While the SFPD declined to comment on the report, its official policy language makes the department’s stance clear. The introduction reads: “Pretext stops are disproportionately carried out against people of color and return negligible public safety benefits.”
