California Doubles Fine on White Drivers

Two men are speeding through a construction zone on a California freeway. They have identical speeds and driving records.

They’re both stopped and get tickets. One man pays $500 and the other $100.

How is that possible? One driver is white and the other is a member of a minority group.

This illegal experiment in disproportionate racial impact known as ‘AB-645 Vehicles: Speed Safety System Pilot Program” passed the California State Assembly 62-9 and the Senate by 29-6 (the ‘no’ votes were nearly all from Republicans) before being signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom. And the systemically racist program is now being rolled out in LA, San Francisco, and other areas before the two-tier fine system can be implemented statewide.

Contrary to its name, AB-645 doesn’t crack down on speeding, instead it actually gives speeders a pass as long as they meet an economic test which will lead to more speeding.

And, like many DEI programs trying to bypass Supreme Court rulings outlawing equity-based racial discrimination, it’s using income tests to disguise its underlying systemic racism, but the racial bias is written right into the text of the bill which falsely claims that “traditional enforcement methods have had a well-documented disparate impact on communities of color, and implicit or explicit racial bias”, mandates that its governing body will work with “racial equity” groups and orders a “racial and economic equity impact analysis” of the impact of fines on minorities.

Speeding enforcement is a matter of math and the least racially biased form of enforcement there is. Two men going 25 miles above the speed limit should receive identical fines.

California’s Democrat majority has now created actual systemically racist enforcement.

Here’s how it works.

AB-645 requires LA, San Francisco and other areas to slash fines and penalties by 80% for “indigent” individuals and by 50% for low-income individuals “up to 250 percent above the federal poverty level.” According to the California Health Care Foundation, only 21% of low-income individuals are white, 60% are Latino and 7% are black.

Using California’s MediCal estimates and average household numbers, members of the average black household would be eligible for a 50% reduction, many Latino households would, but few white and Asian households would qualify for this 50% ‘reduction’ on their tickets and fines.

Those in the ‘indigent’ category, meaning their income is at 125% of the federal poverty level, receive not only an 80% discount, but the opportunity to substitute community service insead.

In San Francisco, one of the locations where this experiment is being rolled out, only 2.6% of white households would qualify for this 80% discount, but 17% of black households and 9.5% of Latinos would. In Los Angeles, only 6.9% of white households, but 14.7% of black households and 13.1% of Latino households would be eligible. (Only 7.9% of Asian households would.)

This is actual systemic racism and disproportionate impact on action.

That’s why the white driver pays $500 and the minority driver pays $100 even though they committed the same offense and have the same record. Another way of looking at it is that the white driver has his ticket and fines increased twofold to fivefold in the name of equity.

Is this experiment in systemic racial equity going to make California roads any safer?

The California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board claimed that black people made up 15% of traffic stops, three times their 5% population, Latinos, who make up 34% of the state, made up 45% of those who were stopped, while white people, who made up 34% of the state, made up 30% of traffic stops. Asians make up 15% of the state, but only 5.3% of traffic stops.

California authorities predictably blamed this on racism without explaining why officers and patrolmen, including in minority forces in major cities, were biased against blacks and Latinos, but not Asians. Despite the history of bigoted jokes and stereotypes about Asian drivers, they were actually far less likely to be stopped than white drivers were. If California law enforcement officers were conducting traffic stops based on their biases, shouldn’t they have been giving in to their prejudices about ‘Asian drivers’ stopping Asian drivers more? But they weren’t.

What these numbers actually revealed was that traffic stop demographics tend to follow the indexes of stable behavior, such as middle-class membership, two-parent families, and lack of involvement in criminal activities, which taken together are predictive of most other behaviors.

A California Policy Lab report castigating the California Highway Patrol for racism was forced to admit that “black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in stop rates for non-moving violations made a small contribution to overall disparities in stops rates.” It found a 17% higher stop rate for black drivers than white drivers for moving violations and a 6.8% higher stop rate for Hispanic drivers. The basis for these disparities was not race, but actual violations.

Assuming that all of this is racially driven also assumes that patrolmen are able to guess the race of a driver in a moving vehicle with incredible pinpoint accuracy before they stop him.

These numbers are not evidence of racial discrimination, but of different offense rates among different groups. By offering 50% and 80% lower ticket and fine rates for groups that are more likely to engage in driving violations, California Democrats are not only engaging in systemic discrimination, but lowering the punishment for bad behaviors by the most likely offenders.

And that will lead to more speeding, more car crashes and more deaths. And those deaths will disproportionately affect minority communities where the bad drivers they are protecting live.

Rather than doing minority groups a favor by letting minority drivers off the hook, California’s new two-tier fine system will lead to more deaths of more minority drivers and pedestrians in the same way that their police defunding programs had sent black murder rates soaring after 2020.

Democrats claim that systemic racism has lethal effects on communities. This systemic racist program actually will cost more minority lives. And leave their blood on Gov. Newsom’s hands.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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