Judge Freezes AG Bonta’s Rule Seeking to Find Discrimination Where There is None

A judge in Sacramento halted the implementation of a new rule imposed on police officers in the state in which they would be required to include their gender identity when reporting traffic stops. The rule was implemented by a so-called anti-discrimination board and was set to go into effect January 1st, 2024.

Assembly Bill 953 by then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber created The Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015, which created a state run board of 19 people. The mission of the board is “to eliminate racial and identity profiling and to improve diversity and racial and identity sensitivity in law enforcement,” according to the Attorney General’s website. As part of fulfilling that mission, the board requires law enforcement  to note the race of the person stopped as well as their own race when filing reports. This is supposed to track possible racial and identity profiling.

Attorney General Bonta’s office recently chose to expand the information collected for traffic stops. A new rule instructed officers to note their own gender identity on traffic stop reports in order to track possible discriminatory and profiling based on gender. This new rule did not take into account male or female, solely cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary.

The Peace Officers Research Association of California, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, and groups of police chiefs and sheriffs organized to file a lawsuit against the new rule. Using Bonta’s ticks against him, legal counsel for the police organizations argued in court that AG Bonta is being hypocritical in asking for law enforcement to disclose their gender identity while he invokes the right to privacy for students by not allowing teachers to inform the student’s parents if he/she identifies as transgender. “Paradoxically, his Department of Justice refused to afford peace officers these same privacy rights,” the lawyer stated.

Furthermore, the gender identity disclosures would be on forms accessible by supervisors and coworkers. If an officer felt uncomfortable to disclose a gender identity and chose not to do so, he/she could be fired. This is a violation of the California civil rights law under the Fair Employment and Housing Act.

The police groups’ arguments were compelling enough for Judge Christopher Krueger of the Sacramento County Superior Court to issue a temporary restraining order on the rule. This order freezes the rule from going into effect at least until after an official hearing on the case, which is currently scheduled for March 19.

The original creation of the RIPA board might have been noble in theory, but one could argue that it does more harm than good. First, its mere existence serves as an expansion of an already overbearing, inefficient, and tax-payer money wasting government. But also, the board’s mission of tracking and calling out alleged law enforcement identity profiling could lead to a soft-on-crime system. An officer may ignore suspicious behavior or suspected criminal activity out of the fear of being labeled as racist or discriminatory.

Moreover, the conception and implementation of the new rule seeking to track discrimination of transgendered Californians seems to be unwarranted. The RIPA board recently released its newest data and statistics on traffic stops and police interactions. The report tracks data from 2022; shockingly a government agency is a year behind in analysis.

According to the report, approximately 0.15% of traffic stops involved transgender individuals. According to the most recent Census data, 1.4% of the population of California identifies as transgender. This means that the number of transgendered people stopped by police was much lower than their representative population. Furthermore, out of a total of over 10,000 complaints and allegations of identity profiling, a paltry 74 complaints were due to gender; that is less than 1%.

The RIPA board’s own report shows no justification for enacting a rule that seeks to track gender identity discrimination. The data show there is no discrimination. It appears AG Bonta is playing political games again trying to claim fire where there is no smoke. By enacting the rule, he assuredly hopes the RIPA board will find the gasoline he needs to stoke the flames of identity and oppression politics the progressive left uses to keep minorities in their pockets. While the rule is on temporary freeze, hopefully the organization of law enforcement will win their case in March striking down the unnecessary rule for good.