Sacramento Police Stop Black Drivers Three Times More Often, ACLU Report Finds

Here’s what happens when the data tells a story nobody really wants to hear, but everybody needs to listen to anyway.

A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has laid bare a stark racial disparity in how Sacramento police conduct traffic stops. Between 2023 and 2024, Black drivers were pulled over at three times the rate of white drivers. Latino drivers faced elevated stops as well. The reason? Overwhelmingly, minor infractions—tinted windows, improperly lighted license plates, equipment violations. The kind of thing that, frankly, stops most drivers on any given day without much consequence. Except here’s the kicker: in 90% of these searches, police seized nothing. Over a quarter of stops resulted in zero outcome whatsoever—no citation, no warning, no arrest.

That’s not law enforcement. That’s a dragnet.

Allyssa Victory, a senior staff attorney at the Northern California ACLU, put it plainly: these stops are“an extension of racial profiling.”They’re being used as pretext—unlawful reasons to dig deeper into people’s lives based on their identity, not their behavior. The data was reported by the Sacramento Police Department itself to the Attorney General’s Office under the 2015 Racial Identity and Profiling Act, which explicitly outlaws racial profiling. So the department can’t claim ignorance.

The Sacramento Police Department issued a statement saying officers receive training on fair and principled policing. But Dr. Kristee Haggins, executive director of Safe Black Space—a nonprofit born directly out of the trauma of the Stephon Clark killing in 2018—cut through that.“If the data is showing that that is not the case,”she said,“then [they need a] revisitation of not only the policies, but how things are being actually practiced.”Training doesn’t work if behavior doesn’t change.

What makes this particularly damning is what the stops *aren’t* accomplishing. Black drivers had the highest rate of no-result stops, despite being pulled over far more frequently. In other words, Sacramento police are stopping people who aren’t committing citable offenses at disproportionate rates. They’re not making streets safer. They’re eroding trust in the community that already has the most reason to fear police encounters.

The ACLU is calling on city officials to pass laws restricting or banning enforcement of low-level, non-safety traffic offenses—a playbook already working in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Mayor Kevin McCarty acknowledged the concern and said the city has“initiated a comprehensive City audit.”That’s a start. But data like this demands more than audits. It demands change.