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I’m guessing that the great majority of these traffic stops are legit.

But then again...the police in a community near me had a secret radio code phrase, something like “light traffic on Main Street”. Whenever a black driver entered the community, the code phrase went out. And the car was stopped on some pretext.

This only ended when a driver got into an altercation with a cop, and somebody thought to examine the radio logs.

I’m not saying the SFPD did anything like that. It could be a very rare thing. But it is the other side of the coin.

“...But it is the other side of the coin.”

People old enough to remember the OJ Simpson case were shocked at the jury’s verdict. At least most white people were. How could the jury come to such a wrong conclusion? A few years later, the answer came out. L.A. had to release dozens of convicted criminals and compensate them for their jail time because it was proven that LAPD routinely planted evidence to either make smaller crimes into more serious ones, or to just get the conviction.

This was apparently common knowledge in the ‘hood. Much of the physical evidence against Simpson, the bloody gloves, against was found by Mark Fuhrman when he jumped/climbed the fence in order to supposedly ‘warn’ Simpson about the murder.

I can imagine the scene in the jury room: “Yeah, the detective jumped the fence to warn Simpson of danger and just happened to find some bloody gloves, we all know that’s BS.” I’m sure there was also talk of, “The Man is trying to take down a famous black man for having a white wife”, and all the other “We’re victims!” stuff as well. Don’t agree with it, but I understand it.

This is not to say that Simpson wasn’t guilty, nor that blacks in SF don’t violate the traffic laws ‘disproportionally’, but it does explain why many blacks, especially those who live on the fringe of lawfulness, think the deck is stacked against them.