In neighborhoods across San Diego County, families know the drill. A broken taillight. Tinted windows. An air freshener hanging from the mirror. Expired tags. For too many Black and Latinx residents, these everyday things aren’t traffic violations — they’re excuses. Excuses for a deputy to pull you over, shine a flashlight in your car and search for a reason to suspect you of something you didn’t do.
This is called a pretextual stop, and it’s why so many residents do not believe the San Diego Police Department or the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office is on their side. Statewide data collected under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act tells the same story: Black and Latinx drivers are far more likely than White drivers to be stopped for minor equipment or paperwork issues rather than unsafe driving.
The numbers make the case better than any opinion essay can. San Diego County is 5.5% Black and 35.7% Latinx — yet Black residents make up 22% of the county jail population and Latinx residents 46%. A 2020 Campaign Zero analysis, commissioned by the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, reviewed more than 70,000 Sheriff’s Office stops and 150,000 San Diego police stops from 2018 and 2019. Black people were more likely than White people to be stopped in 85% of city police beats and in every area of the Sheriff’s Office’s jurisdiction. Overall, Black people were 130% more likely to be stopped by deputies. A 2021 Campaign Zero analysis found the disparity even higher within the city: SDPD stopped Black people at a 219% higher rate than White people.
And once the lights come on, the disparity gets worse at both agencies. Once stopped, Black and Latinx people were more likely than White people to be searched, arrested and subjected to force. SDPD was 23% more likely to conduct consent searches on Black people than White people, even though Black people were less likely to be found with contraband. Campaign Zero found the Sheriff’s Office’s pattern even broader, discriminating against Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American people, as well as people with disabilities, when deciding whom to search. Let that sink in: our neighbors are searched more by both agencies but are less likely to be found guilty of anything.
This is the pattern that has broken trust in both agencies. Agencies that stop and search Black and Latinx residents at these rates, year after year, without changing course, are telling those communities exactly how much their safety weighs. You cannot claim to protect a community while treating its members as suspects for driving to work. When residents can predict, based on nothing but the color of their skin, that they are more likely to be pulled over and searched — and less likely to have done anything wrong — both agencies have forfeited the presumption of good faith they ask the public to extend. That is not law enforcement. That is harassment with a badge.
Every one of these stops carries a cost far beyond the roadside. It shows up in a mother who dreads her teenager driving to work. In a father who has “the talk” with his kids not about strangers, but about deputies. In neighbors who stop calling for help because they no longer trust who shows up. Pretextual stops don’t make San Diego safer — they make entire communities feel policed rather than protected, and they teach young Black and Latinx residents that their skin color is a target long before they’ve done anything wrong.
They also drain resources our region desperately needs elsewhere. Every minute spent fishing through a stopped car over a burned-out bulb is a minute not spent responding to an emergency or investigating a real crime. And every unnecessary arrest that begins with a pretextual stop adds another body to a county jail system already buckling under overcrowding, much of it fueled by Proposition 36 charges for low-level offenses. Ending pretextual stops isn’t just about civil rights. It’s about pointing limited public safety resources at what actually threatens our communities.
San Diego wouldn’t be alone. The Los Angeles Police Department restricted pretextual stops in 2022, and San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Seattle have moved in the same direction. Studies of these shifts have found no resulting spike in crime, because pretextual stops were never an effective crime-fighting tool. They were a dragnet.
Real public safety isn’t measured in how many people get pulled over. It’s measured in whether communities can thrive — stable housing, good jobs, quality schools and youth programs that give young people somewhere to grow instead of somewhere to be watched. Every dollar and hour poured into pretextual stops is a dollar and hour not invested in what actually keeps communities safe.
This isn’t an oversight to be studied further. It’s a choice the county keeps making, stop after stop, year after year. San Diego doesn’t need another report to know what its own numbers already scream. If law enforcement won’t rein in these practices on its own, the public must force the issue. Ban pretextual stops. Not eventually. Now.
Woodson is a civil rights attorney and the legal director of Pillars of the Community, a grassroots nonprofit organization in southeastern San Diego.