You won’t get much argument from anyone, including the proglodytes, about California’s progressive credentials. Blue states want to be California when they grow up, and Democrats in every state want to emulate it. The economic and social downward spiral associated with left-wing priorities only seems to catalyze their desire to duplicate it where they live.
Take BLM for example. Pre-Floyd, the Leftist state on the left Coast had already made significant improvements to not just police involved shootings of California blacks but all shootings of black men in the state. Peace officer shootings were down to 14 a year, and total statewide shootings of black men were down from 567 to 479, hitting a low of 433 the year before.
Post-Floyd, the state made a big show of inequity in policing, but while police-related shootings of black men remained flat, black men died in droves. 672 in 2020, 690 in 2021, and 676 in 2022. At its peak of relevance, Black Lives Mattered less to blacks than to anyone else. And while there were a lot of tensions you could point to, less policing in the places where black men’s lives are least likely to matter (in Black neighborhoods) probably resulted in the spike.
A rising murder-rate clearance record, impossible without more engagement by police “in the community,” has nearly cut that number in half. In 2026 there were only 8 officer-involved shootings and only 372 others. Black Lives suddenly matter, but it takes policing to get shooters off the street.
That hasn’t prevented the defunders from racing to microphones to blame inequitable policing. But that seems to be a problem they are not particularly serious about.
California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act data consistently show that Black Californians experience police stops at rates disproportionate to their share of the state’s population. For many, the disparity itself has become evidence of inequitable policing.
But a disparity is not an explanation.
RIPA itself illustrates the limits of interpreting those disparities. California collects extensive information about the perceived race and ethnicity of people stopped. Still, its statewide stop statistics do not identify the race or ethnicity of the officers making those contacts. Officer demographics would not explain every disparity, but their absence is notable in a system designed to examine racial profiling. The data tell us a great deal about who is being stopped while providing less information about who is doing the policing—or the public-safety conditions producing those contacts.
Roughly 40% of all peace officers in the state are not white. In LA County, only 30% are white. 70% are black, Latino, Asian, or other.
If anyone anywhere is serious about the topic of inequality in police stops, then you can’t make any claims unless you identify the race of the officers making the stops.
It reeks of the same hypocrisy that surrounded the response to Floyd in the first place. A super-majority of the systemic abuses are in cities where the police forces had been answering to democrat civilian leadership for decades.
It wasn’t just cops or all cops; it was cops managed by Democrats.
And it still is, but California appears to have done something. It has found a way to be a lousy left-wing shit hole while saving more black lives by arresting and convicting the people shooting blacks. While making all the other crime worse.
