Fresno police stop Black drivers more often. Chief says it’s not racist, others disagree
D’Aungillique Jackson was pulled over twice in two days the summer after her freshman year at Fresno State in 2017.
First, a police officer told her she was speeding on her way to work. On her drive home the next day, she was grilled by two officers about whether she had been involved in a burglary. She was let go, without a ticket, both times. The first incident was particularly traumatic, she said.
“I was 18 or 19, in Fresno, by myself,” said Jackson, now president of Fresno State’s chapter of the NAACP. “When I tried to reach for my phone to call my parents, he put his hand on his gun and said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ I started crying.”
Jackson’s story is familiar to many of Fresno’s Black residents.
Black drivers in Fresno are stopped by police around twice the rate of white and Hispanic drivers, according to a Fresno Bee analysis of police department data from the first half of 2020. Black drivers were also searched, arrested, and handcuffed more often than other races, the data shows.
“As a Black male driving in Fresno, when you see a police officer, there’s always the fear they’re going to pull you over,” said Marcel Woodruff, an organizer with Faith in the Valley. “These numbers give voice to a feeling a lot of us hold.”
Fresno, however, is no different than the rest of the state. Across California, Black drivers were stopped at more than twice their share of the population in 2018, according to state data. They were also searched and arrested more often.
As the country reeled from the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last June, city leaders and activists in Fresno put together the commission for police reform to address longstanding inequities in local policing.
In light of the new data, newly appointed Police Chief Paco Balderrama and other officials told The Bee many of the commission’s recommendations are on their way to becoming a reality.
But in many ways, activists and law enforcement remain at odds about the way forward.
Balderrama said that while there might be some bias in the police department, it’s not pervasive. Rather, he said, the numbers reflect the racial makeup of the gangs and neighborhoods that account for most of the city’s crime. And the answer is deploying more resources to prevent more crime.
Activists, on the other hand, insist the answer lies not in more policing but the reversal of decades of disinvestment in south Fresno. Both agree that remedying the racial disparities will take years — and even the commission’s recommendations will not suffice.
“We’re going to keep seeing these numbers until we get to the root of the issue,” Woodruff said.
Black drivers stopped at disproportionate rates in Fresno
Between January and June of 2020, Black drivers accounted for about 14% of the Fresno Police Department’s traffic stops, nearly twice the share of the Black population of driving age in the city, according to state Department of Justice data obtained through a Public Records Act request.
The Bee’s data analysis also shows Black drivers were handcuffed and arrested at disproportionate rates. And while Black drivers were searched about twice as frequently as whites and Hispanics, police were more likely to find contraband on white drivers.
Balderrama said police are mostly deployed in south Fresno — where most residents are people of color — because there is more crime.
“The areas of need, the areas where there is the most violence, happen to be the areas that are Black and brown,” he said. “So when you have a larger amount of police officers in those neighborhoods, which need the police presence, obviously you’re going to make more contact with people who live in that neighborhood.”
When asked why Black drivers were searched or arrested at disproportionate rates, Balderrama said he believes most crimes in Fresno are committed by gang members, the majority of whom are Hispanic or Black. Part of the process of identifying gang members, he explained, is pulling over cars. Over half of the homicide victims last year, he said, were Black men.
“That’s disproportionate as well. That’s alarming to me,” he said. “So that requires some type of police response.”
He admitted racism or unconscious bias might play a role in the disproportionality, albeit minor.
“Is it a majority of the police officers? I would say it’s vastly the minority,” he said.
Advocates, on the other hand, argue that the heavy police presence in south Fresno contributes to the problem. Woodruff, from Faith in the Valley, argued that Black people aren’t necessarily committing more crime, just being detained more often.
“You can’t look at blackness as a monolith,” he said. “You can’t say all of Black Fresno is doing this. All Black bodies are now perceived as guilty, so you have to over-police them.”
Ashley Rojas, executive director of Fresno Barrios Unidos, traces the heavy crime in south Fresno to its historical neglect. Instead of targeting the poverty and disinvestment that leads to substance use or gang affiliation, Fresno has only thrown more police into the mix, she said, further traumatizing residents.
About 37% of people who live in southwest Fresno said they had observed police use excessive force, compared with around 20% of respondents in other areas, according to a recent survey conducted by the Fresno State sociology department.
“We allow them to deteriorate, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that they’re unsafe,” Rojas said. “If we were truly practicing prevention, we would be investing into our neighborhoods’ medical systems, schools, and childcare.”
“There’s a lot of blame put on our families for raising or allowing our young men to become gang members,” she added. “But when were our families ever supported to have the capacity to invest in themselves?”
Fresno’s Black drivers are often pulled over ‘for no reason’
Black drivers were twice as likely as white drivers to have stops result in no action or only a warning, The Bee’s analysis of the California Department of Justice data shows.
The finding reaffirms the idea that Black people are pulled over for no reason, according to Former Councilmember Oliver Baines, who was once a Fresno police officer himself and led the commission for police reform. Nearly half of Black Fresno residents say they have seen the police stop someone without good reason, according to the Fresno State survey.
Balderrama, however, said the findings show Black drivers are let off easier than others, precisely because the police want to avoid accusations of racism.
“I would argue a lot of them tend to cut more breaks in certain neighborhoods because they don’t want to be accused of anything inappropriate,” he said.
When he was councilmember, Baines said he was pulled over for speeding. After Baines refuted that, the officer told him they were actually looking for a stolen vehicle, and his license plate was similar.
“Most of the times I’ve been stopped was for no reason,” Baines said. “And I can tell you that any Black person will have a story identical to that.”
Jackson recalled that in 2019, she and her friends, all of them Black, were followed by a police car for several blocks approaching University Village at Fresno State.
The police told everyone to roll down their windows and asked only the Black man in the backseat for his ID. He was asked whether he was on probation or parole, Jackson said, before the driver was asked for her license or given a reason for the stop.
Only after Jackson pressed the officers did they admit they pulled them over because the license plate’s light was out. They were let off with a warning, she said.
Driving with Black people in the car in Fresno
The issue doesn’t end with driving while Black, however. Just having a Black person in the car resulted in escalated police action, multiple Fresno residents told The Bee.
Nadine Trujillo, 44, said she believes she was pulled over last year because the police “saw an afro, plain and simple.”
Trujillo, a Hispanic woman, was driving her daughter and her daughter’s friend, both seniors in high school, to an event at Fresno State in early 2020. She was getting ready to turn left on Shaw and Cedar in northeast Fresno when her daughter panicked — a police officer was shining a light into the backseat through her friend’s window. He ordered them to pull over using a megaphone.
The girl’s seat belt had come undone, Trujillo explained, because the buckle was missing its cover. The family had been struggling to get the part replaced and usually made the belt buckle with some finagling.
After pulling over and providing all her information, Trujillo said the officer opened the backseat and told the girl to get out. Trujillo described the officer as “aggressive.”
“He started telling her, ‘I can write you a ticket because you’re 18 years old. I can write you a ticket,’” she said. “I told the officer twice: ‘This is my responsibility as an adult. It’s not her fault. It’s my fault.’”
Finally, the officer gave Trujillo a fix-it ticket, which will cost her $700 after she missed her initial court date over a medical emergency.
“I took them to the event, and when they got home, I had to apologize because I felt bad for the young lady,” Trujillo said. “I knew what that was all about. No one is ever going to change my mind on that.”
Yeng Her, a 29-year-old Asian woman, said she believes she was stopped in 2018 because her baby’s father, a Black man, was in the car with her. She was about four months pregnant at the time.
Her was pulling her old Lexus SUV out of a parking lot on Kings Canyon and Chestnut in southeast Fresno when she made eye contact with a police officer. As she drove past his car, he pulled her over for a missing front license plate, she said.
Over the course of the stop, three other patrol cars pulled up. Her vehicle was surrounded by four officers, she said. The police asked to search her car and see her boyfriend’s ID.
“Why are you so upset?” she recalls the police officer asked.
“There’s no need for four patrol cars,” she said she replied. “This is ridiculous. For a front license plate, you want to search my car? There’s no reason for you to want to search my car over a front license plate. Are you looking for someone? Because it’s clearly not me.”
One of the officers then asked Her to exit her vehicle so that he could give her a ticket, she said. He also inspected her back to see if she had any tattoos. After Her signed her citation, she was let go, she said.
When she told her friends about the incident, they were not surprised, she said.
“Nobody even asked, ‘Do you think it’s because he was in the car with you?’ They just knew.”
Balderrama said he couldn’t comment on the specifics of these cases because the department had not reviewed the incidents. But he chalked up a majority of the complaints the police department receives to miscommunication.
“When our police officers get out there, it’s important for us to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” he said.
Still, he urged anyone who believes they were stopped for no reason or feels an officer acted inappropriately, to file a complaint.
“We want to know about it because we will look into it,” he said.
When Her was stopped again for speeding a year later, with only her child in Fig Garden, she said the officer never mentioned the license plate, which was still missing.
Progress for Fresno’s police reform commission
In November, the City Council unanimously accepted Fresno’s commission on police reform report. The report’s 73 recommendations ranged from hiring a more diverse police force to removing officers from school campuses. Now, City Councilmember Miguel Arias said they are putting together a team to review those changes and their legal implications, alongside the City Attorney’s Office.
Balderrama said he was impressed by the recommendations. By the end of the year, he hopes to implement about 20 of them, including not dispatching police to respond to non-criminal calls and modifying language in the police code. He also said that while officers already undergo unconscious bias training, that will increase during his tenure.
Balderrama was more hesitant about other recommendations, like removing police officers from school campuses.
But tackling policing culture and addressing the deep mistrust held by communities of color — which he believes will help change traffic stop data — will take much longer.
“I would like to stay here 10 years or more,” he said, “because that’s how long it’s going to take to see some of these changes.”
Baines said he was encouraged by the city’s and the department’s commitment to change. But cautioned that the numbers wouldn’t improve much without wholesale changes to police training across the country.
“We’re a long way from being done,” Baines said. “These problems still exist, and they’re not as far in our rearview mirror as people would like to think.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM.