Black residents make up about 11% of Long Beach’s population, but they account for 36% of police citations for minor infractions like jaywalking, smoking in a park and riding a bike at night without a light. Those are among the findings in a study released Wednesday from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which analyzed non-traffic infraction data from California’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies between July 2018 and December 2019. Overall, the study found that Black adults in each of those 15 jurisdictions were between 1.5 and 9.7 times more likely to be cited than white adults in the same jurisdiction. Latinx adults were up to 5.8 times more likely to receive citations. The numbers, which come from public records requests and information provided under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), highlight deep racial disparities in policing, organization members said. “Black, Latinx, homeless and disabled Californians […]
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