Do you know why I pulled you over today?
We've all heard it if we've been pulled over by
an officer while driving.
But a new state law prohibits officers from asking that
question.
Rather, they must tell you why you're being stopped in
the first place.
It just builds that Community Trust.
We believe California Assembly Bill 2776,
signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022,
goes into effect on January 1st.
All officers now required to reveal why they pull a
driver over and report it to the state.
That's something that we've been training in our Academy for
years,
Sacramento Police officer Anthony Gamble tells Fox 40.
The Academy teaches its new recruits to tell drivers which
driving laws they violated.
The Sacramento policing policy, he says That dates back to
2005.
Bit more legitimacy. It lets people understand kind of where
you're coming from and kind of why I'm stopping you
and giving you an opportunity to maybe give an explanation
as to why you committed that violation.
But in data collected by the attorney general's office from
4.5 million traffic stops across the state this year,
results show racial profiling exists.
An officer initiated pullovers. I mean,
I just recently was pulled over just the other day
and it was,
you know, the officer asked me,
you know, do you know why you're getting pulled over?
Numbers show Hispanic drivers are stopped more than anyone else
out on the road.
Racial and black drivers are pulled over at the highest
rate despite making up less than 14%
of drivers. Analyze data reveals black drivers vehicles were searched
1.6 times more than white drivers.
Yet evidence of further crimes was discovered less often.
I think there's always loopholes,
loopholes in traffic stops and in this new state law,
according to Barry Axios. This is just another law that's
a Gray area law,
the Sacramento area activist tells FOX 40 racially biased police
officers.
Will skirts around the new traffic law and get into
driver's cars if there's no deterrent?
Don't have a consequence that makes them say,
OK, I'm being fine or I'm being penalized,
I can't do this. Then what?
I mean it's it's your word versus my word.
You want the community to kind of stand up and
celebrate it as if you know it'll change things.
Will it really change things?
Axios isn't confident that it will.
Also included in the new reporting the results of each
stop,
whether there was an arrest,
a citation, or if the driver was let go.
And in this year's data,
black drivers were let go without incident more than 12%
of the time. That's higher than any other driver.