Police in California no longer will be asked to disclose their gender identity to an anti-discrimination board for traffic stops after a recent ruling in Sacramento County Superior Court.
Regulations that began in January under California Attorney General Rob Bonta required police officers to include if they are cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary in reports they submit on traffic stops, with the data used to analyze if an officer’s gender affected who they stopped.
The reports are submitted to the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board, which was established in 2015 to reduce alleged racial profiling by police. Since it was formed, officers have been required to submit reports with information on the people they stop, including their gender, but not their own.
But after the new regulations went into effect this year, law enforcement associations pushed back.
“While [the profiling advisory board] was enacted to address concerns of bias and discrimination through racial and identity profiling … the mandatory self-identification regulation paradoxically forces the most vulnerable officers to disclose their gender identity to their public employers,” reads a December letter to Mr. Bonta’s office by law enforcement groups. In the letter, they asked for such self-identification to be voluntary.
Despite threats of legal recourse, Mr. Bonta never responded to the request.
Ultimately, the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, California Assn. of Highway Patrolmen, California Police Chiefs Assn., and the California State Sheriffs Assn. filed suit earlier this year against the state, the California Department of Justice and Mr. Bonta demanding the new requirement be struck down.
The regulation lasted just three weeks until it was blocked by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Christopher Krueger Jan. 23 when he issued a temporary restraining order against it, at the request of the law enforcement agencies.
In recent court filings, attorneys for the associations argued that under federal law, employees may be asked to self-identify by their employers but are allowed to decline. Employers can use employment records or related information to determine their gender instead, attorneys wrote.
They also said an officer’s gender identity “has little or no probative value when evaluating an officer’s performance,” for when they stop people, according to a brief by attorney’s filed in superior court in March.
On April 30 Judge Krueger issued a permanent injunction permanently banning the requirement.
The ruling doesn’t forfeit the state’s right to implement new and unrelated regulations related to racial profiling, according to the recent ruling.
