The Bias in Fresno’s Justice System
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reported by master's students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. The stories explore the impact of the vast racial and economic inequality in Fresno, the poorest major city in California.
A jacket with a police badge sewn onto its shoulder hangs in the the office of Fresno City Councilman Oliver Baines III. He had served on the city’s police force for about a decade before he was elected to public office. In an interview in his City Hall office, Baines, the only black member of the council, paused before answering a question about the police department’s treatment of black drivers.
“I got pulled over last night,” he said. He recounted the previous night’s incident, which occurred as he drove to his home in southwest Fresno. The officer who stopped him told him he was speeding, but Baines knew he wasn’t and said so. The officer told him that it seemed like he was speeding, before adding that Baines’s license plate was similar to the plate of a recently stolen vehicle. After looking over his driver’s license, the officer let Baines go.
“So, just like that. No real reason whatsoever,” Baines said. “The justice system is not set up to treat people equally. That's true across the country.”
In Fresno’s justice system, from its police department, to its schools, to its jail, unequal treatment is the norm. Data obtained from of more than 40,000 traffic stops in 2016 shows that black drivers accounted for 15 percent of officers’ stops—twice the share of the black population in the city that’s of driving-age, and nearly triple the rate that white drivers were stopped. And traffic stops can escalate more severely for black motorists. The analysis of Fresno police traffic stop data reveals that officers search black drivers at a rate two-and-a-half times that of white drivers and arrest black drivers twice as often. Of the 4,800 cars that Fresno police searched in 2016, a quarter belonged to black drivers, yet black drivers make up just 8 percent of the city’s driving age population. This highlights a troubling trend: as police interactions get more serious, the disparities become more profound.
