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Tell Assembly to Protect Bike Riders from Pretextual Traffic Stops
When a police officer uses a traffic stop as cover to check for a more serious crime, that’s pretextual policing. Unfortunately, this type of enforcement does little to improve traffic safety and isn’t effective at reducing other types of crime. When police pull over bike riders for minor offenses, they disproportionately target Black and Latino people on bikes and rarely find evidence of crimes, as an LA Times investigation demonstrated.
This week, the Assembly will vote on a bill already approved by the Senate, which would end pretextual traffic stops of people biking or driving. It will lead to fairer and more effective policing. Please email your assemblymember today.
Pretextual traffic stops do more harm than good
When police use traffic stops as a type of “stop and frisk” on wheels, they target drivers in high-crime areas, not streets prone to traffic violence. These traffic stops do nothing to prevent speeding or reckless driving, and they don’t make the streets safer for people biking or walking.
Pretextual stops are also a bad tactic if the goal is to combat crime. A report by Catalyst California and the ACLU found that traffic stops in several Southern California counties were racially biased and rarely uncovered serious crimes. Freeing police to spend more time on proven methods to solve and prevent crime would be a better use of law enforcement budgets and a benefit to communities.
Traffic stops are the most common time for citizens to come in contact with law enforcement, and sometimes those encounters can turn deadly. By reducing the number of traffic stops, we can reduce fatalities and make our streets safer for all Californians.
Please tell your assemblymember to vote yes on SB 50. It just takes a minute.
Arrested Mobility Report Supports Decriminalizing Biking and Walking
Equitable Cities, led by renowned scholar Charles Brown, recently released a report about transportation-related policies and practices across the country that limit mobility, opportunity, and access for Black Americans and other people of color. Arrested Mobility finds that these policies deliver profound obstacles to equitable access to our public roadways, reflecting structural racism and White supremacy in policy, planning, design and infrastructure, and law enforcement.
It’s worth taking a closer look because this critical research points toward the need for change in traffic enforcement and CalBike’s Biking Is Not a Crime campaign.
Discriminatory laws aren’t just relics of the past
Arrested Mobility examines laws governing walking, biking, and e-scooter use. It surveys policies in all 50 states, plus the two largest cities in each state, as well as selected counties. The researchers find that these laws serve as a legal mechanism for racist, discriminatory, and predatory police enforcement.
Laws that enable biased policing aren’t just found in outdated regulations enacted decades ago. As e-scooters have increased their mode share, new mobility laws have been added to the books and often carry considerable ambiguity, as well as evidence of racist enforcement. Many of the laws regulating e-scooter equipment and behavior are similar to those regulating biking: It’s almost impossible to ensure equitable enforcement, and there’s inconclusive evidence that these policies improve safety outcomes.
California advocacy reflects national trends
This national study reinforces what we’ve found and have been fighting against here in California. In fact, the study’s number one recommendation is to repeal laws, decriminalize violations, and promote alternative enforcement for policies that have minimal impact on safety and that are enforced in a racially discriminatory manner. We did this with the leadership of Assemblymember Phil Ting by passing the Freedom to Walk Act in 2022, to significantly decriminalize “jaywalking.”
The study’s additional policy recommendations also address ongoing policy advocacy we’re doing in the California legislature. Building more active transportation infrastructure is our top goal for the state, not only to make our streets safer from traffic violence but also to reduce unwanted encounters with police. Encouraging the legislature to devote more resources to Complete Streets in the state budget will make people walking and biking safer both from traffic violence and police violence.
CalBike’s campaigns to make our streets safe for all Californians
Placing limits on pretextual stops was the goal of the Freedom to Walk Act, and we’re pushing for an expanded effort this year with the Stop Pretextual Policing Bill, authored by Senator Steven Bradford, which will decriminalize many low-level bicycle violations. The bill will also allow communities to remove traffic enforcement from the purview of armed police officers, reducing the risk of injury and death during a police-initiated traffic stop.
The Arrested Mobility study found that 32 states have laws strictly prohibiting sidewalk riding. Sidewalk riding ranked higher for states and counties than for city governments — an interesting outcome considering that cities are more likely to construct and maintain sidewalks than state and county governments. Sidewalk riding is another offense often selectively enforced against Black and Latino Californians, as uncovered in a bombshell LA Times investigation.
CalBike is sponsoring the Sidewalk Riding Bill, led by Assemblymember Issac Bryan, to address this issue, and so far our lawmakers agree. Riding on the sidewalk isn’t ideal, but for many streets, riding on the sidewalk is the only safe option. More than half of the country’s most dangerous roads for pedestrians are in predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods, and police have used sidewalk riding bans to target people of color, often in communities without safe biking infrastructure.
Growing movement challenges discriminatory traffic laws
Arrested Mobility will be an invaluable resource for policy advocates such as ourselves and the growing movement across the country to change discriminatory mobility policies at all governmental levels. Many of the laws documented by the researchers are still on the books. While they’re intended to serve a pragmatic purpose, in practice they unfairly target Black people and other people of color.
This study shows the urgent need for additional research into how these policies are enforced in specific state, county, and local contexts, as well as their potential to be enforced inequitably. It certainly inspires us at CalBike to keep researching specific laws that can be reformed so that all Californians can move safely.
Act Now to Stop Baseless Searches of People on Bikes
The Stop Baseless Searches Bill (AB 93, Bryan) prevents police from asking for “consent” to search someone during a traffic stop when they have no probable cause to conduct a search.
These unwarranted searches are more likely to target Black and Latino Californians and more likely to target people on bikes, so this measure is critical to creating safe streets for all Californians.
“Consent” can’t be freely given in the context of the power imbalance and a history of police harassment of people of color. CHP has already adopted this guideline to make policing more equitable. AB 93 will expand the policy to local law enforcement.
AB 93, the Stop Baseless Searches Bill is in trouble.
AB 93 doesn’t have enough votes to pass the Assembly. It’s being held open right now while supporters try to gather more votes. Please email your assemblymember today and tell them to Vote YES on AB 93.
Protection from Police Violence Is Integral to Safe Streets
CalBike is working on several fronts for bicycle safety. Traffic violence against people walking and biking has been increasing in recent years as more people turn to active transportation for our daily activities and pleasures. The concept of Complete Streets, or reconfiguring our roads to allow for all modes of transportation, is one of the safest and most accessible approaches our state’s decision-makers can take toward transportation equity, which is why we’re making it a priority in our policy advocacy this year through our multi-year Invest/Divest campaign.
But poorly designed streets coupled with careless or aggressive driving aren’t the only sources of danger on our streets. For too long, we have leaned on traffic enforcement rather than infrastructure to make our streets safe. Unfortunately, rather than targeting dangerous driving, biased traffic stops disproportionately target Black and Latino Californians, making no one safer and and our most vulnerable residents less secure.
To be truly safe, Californians need to be able to get where they need to go without fear of being stopped, harassed, and potentially harmed by police violence. That’s why CalBike is working to pass our Biking Is Not a Crime slate of bills.
Two kinds of danger for people on bikes
Almost every Californian who uses a bicycle for transportation or recreation has experienced some form of aggression or violence on the road. It might have been a driver passing so close you almost got clipped by their mirror or a right-turning vehicle operator cutting you off. Your community probably has stretches of roadway where bikes must ride uncomfortably close to fast-moving traffic.
These and other types of traffic violence have a clear solution: We need better infrastructure to make biking safe. This includes separated bikeways, protected intersections, Complete Streets, connected bike routes, and more.
Unfortunately, California invests far too little in safe bike infrastructure and instead spends huge amounts of money on policing to enforce traffic laws.
There’s a problem with this approach: Police enforcement does little or nothing to prevent traffic violence. And it leads to a second type of danger for people who get around by bike.
If you’re White or you live in a well-resourced neighborhood, you might never have been stopped by the police while on your bike. But Black and Latino Californians, especially men and especially those who live in disadvantaged communities, do get stopped, often for minor infractions such as riding on a sidewalk where there are no bike lanes available or riding without a front light.
Police stops of people on bikes are often attempts to preempt criminal activity, rather than enhance traffic safety. And they fail on that account, too. As a 2021 LA Times investigation showed, police are more likely to stop Black and Latino Californians on bikes, more likely to search people stopped while biking, and rarely find any evidence of criminal activity during those stops.
California’s Racial Identity Profiling Advisory Board (RIPA) came to the same conclusion in its 2023 report: “During stops for bicycle-related offenses, officers were 3.2 times as likely to perform a search, 3.8 times as likely to detain the individual, and 2.7 times as likely to handcuff the individual. Overall, officers were more likely to search, detain, or handcuff a person during a bicycle-related stop when compared to stops for reasons other than bicycle violations.” On top of this, police are more likely to search, detain, or handcuff individuals who were perceived to be Latino and Black.
Adding to the injustice, low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often have little safe bicycle infrastructure, so decades of systemic racism and neglect become a weapon to further punish people in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Fortunately, we can solve this problem and take a more effective approach to making our streets safer.
Changing the way we think about safe streets for people biking and walking
Unfortunately, just updating our street infrastructure is not enough to protect people walking and biking. We need to consider the equity and justice issues at the center of this problem. As we do that, our focus changes to the well-being of people who travel through streets rather than centering the well-being of streets. Complete Streets not only have well-designed crosswalks and protected bike lanes; they are also places where people of all identities and bodies are safe.
[pull quote] As we pass through public spaces, we experience multiple kinds of security and insecurity due to societal attitudes toward race, class, gender, age, ability, and modes of transportation.
Since the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, the role of unequal and violent police enforcement on our public streets has become a topic of heated debate and urgent reforms. The protests that followed that and other police shootings, usually of Black people, exposed deeply embedded racial divides.
The institution of policing and law enforcement has a long, sordid history in the U.S. and California, particularly for Black Californians. Criminalization has been a key tool for maintaining racial hierarchies. And the criminalization of mobility through traffic enforcement is one of the main ways the public interacts with the police. The recent RIPA report is the latest of many government studies to show that traffic stops are the number one reason people encounter law enforcement and are the greatest source of Black-White disparities among routine law enforcement activity.
So it’s essential to advocate for better bikeways, but it’s not enough. Infrastructure, not policing, is the recipe for safer streets, but California’s budget and policy priorities put too much emphasis on enforcement and not enough on infrastructure. And to build just, prosperous, and equitable communities where everyone has access to mobility options, we need to refocus police efforts away from traffic stops and biased searches and toward community policing initiatives that will truly make our neighborhoods safer.
Why does CalBike care about over-policing and criminalization?
Most traffic stops involve someone stopped while driving a car. But people walking and biking are often more susceptible to police interactions than people in cars.
Often folks in marginalized communities have no other way to get around other than by walking, biking, and taking transit. And people stopped for bicycle-related violations, pedestrian roadway violations, or standing on a sidewalk are often easy targets for police harassment. Policing has become a primary non-solution to the problems of poverty and crime that has damaging effects on those over-policed.
Pretextual stops and searches by police are common during stops of people on bikes, particularly people of color. A pretext stop occurs when an officer stops someone for a lawful traffic violation or minor infraction with the intention of using the stop to investigate a hunch regarding a different crime. By itself, police wouldn’t have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to stop the person for the suspected crime, but they use the traffic violation as a pretext to perform a search.
This policing tactic is as ineffective as it is common. Research shows that pretextual stops rarely result in the recovery of contraband or weapons. In addition, pretextual stops are costly and degrade public trust in law enforcement.
Efforts to eliminate or reduce pretextual stops and searches have gained national momentum in recent years, particularly after several high-profile killings of Black and Brown men in California for safely walking and biking. For example, the City of Berkeley and other communities have taken steps to remove armed officers from traffic enforcement, to reduce the risk of potentially lethal police encounters. CalBike’s Biking Is Not a Crime slate is part of this statewide movement toward smarter and more cost-effective policing and traffic safety.
Decriminalizing mobility is an important and concrete step we can take in ensuring street safety for all. We had an important victory last year with the passage of the Freedom to Walk Act, but there is much more work to be done.
To create Complete Streets in California where people using all transportation modes can move freely, we need to free our streets from both traffic violence AND pretextual policing. CalBike is working hard on both fronts.