After a lengthy and contentious process to restrict police “pretext” stops, data from the San Francisco Police Department shows a reduction in the racial disparities long seen in traffic enforcement.
Pretext stops are the use of certain non-moving traffic violations, like hanging an air freshener from a rearview mirror or missing a single tail light, as the primary reason for a police stop. A policy, implemented by the civilian police commission last year, restricted those stops.
The commissioners’ reasoned that officers disproportionately targeted Black drivers as a pretext to search for criminal activity.
Soon after the new policy went into effect in 2024, white people surpassed Black people as the group subject to the most searches for the first time since 2021.
That is more in line with San Francisco’s demographics. The city is more than 50 percent white, and Black people make up only about 5 percent of the city’s population. But they historically accounted for up to 40 percent of drivers searched, while white people often made up under 30 percent of those searched.
Proponents say they’re happy with the change.
“The initial impacts of this policy show that we can reduce the over-policing of communities of color without compromising public safety,” said Public Defender Mano Raju, whose office was involved in advocating for the policy, in a statement. “The Police Commission should continue to uphold and monitor this policy to protect the public from harmful and wasteful pretext stops.”
The proportion of Black drivers being stopped for traffic violations has dropped: Black people made up less than 20 percent of drivers stopped in 2025 — the first time that’s happened since the SFPD began presenting this data in 2019. Black drivers have historically been six times more likely to be stopped than white drivers.
“The data itself is very encouraging. We want to make sure it’s being sustained,” said Police Commission President C. Don Clay, who added that it was “way too early” to consider the disparity issues resolved.
The police commission voted to approve the policy in early 2023, but labor negotiations with the police union went slowly, leading to the commission ultimately adopting the policy over the union’s objections in early 2024. The policy went into effect in July 2024.
That October, the police union filed a lawsuit to overturn the policy, which a judge dismissed in September 2025.
I talked to a local cop about this. His take was basically, “I know who the bad guys are and I use whatever I can to get them off the streets”. And, that’s the guy who generally talks about how so many other cops really stretch the rules. In one instance, a guy was able to search a girls purse because she was “sitting on a fire-hydrant”, which is supposedly not legal. The thing is, the cop found drugs in the purse and they were there because the guy she was with was a dealer that he knew and he knew the guy stored his stash in his girlfriends purse. So, for the cop, this was a brilliant move showing his vast knowledge of the CA criminal code. For me, it was literally no different than pulling someone over using a taillight out as an excuse because you think they look like a criminal. (ie. black)
Anyway, this is a step in the right direction. We all need to realize that the laws that protect criminals and make it hard for cops ALSO protects us from abuse. I have personally experienced this, as a cop once threatened me with a bunch of false charges if I didn’t turn in someone else (who i didn’t even know). For him, this was a common practice to get information. However, since I couldn’t come up with an answer, it resulted in me spending 3 days in jail until the charges were dismissed.
Cops aren’t all bad, but we really need to assume that a lot of them are willing to twist the law as far as possible to get what they see as “the right” result. As we now see with ICE, allowing for that abuse means it can be used on anyone.