How does the justice system work? Who does it work for? Does the justice system treat all Americans equally?
These are among the questions posed at the start of a Feb. 4 virtual community dialogue on the justice system, hosted by Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Santa Maria in partnership with the Racial Justice Committee of the Santa Barbara County Public Defender’s Office.
The meeting brought together a panel of Santa Barbara County public defenders to talk about “the racial bias that we as members of the public don’t see” in the criminal justice system, SURJ member Pam Gates said at the start of the event. It marked the first community dialogue sponsored by SURJ Santa Maria.
Attorney Juan Higuera, a founding member of the Racial Justice Committee and a public defender, started the panel discussion by breaking down one of the most common ways people come into contact with the police: traffic stops.
“In 2020 Stanford University put out a study called the Open Policing Project, and among other things, they reached several conclusions about arrests, specifically about traffic stops,” Higuera said. “After reviewing over 100 million police reports from across the country, Black drivers were 20 percent more likely to be stopped by police than their white counterparts.”
But what’s more, Higuera continued, is the study “pretty explicitly established that there might be some sort of racial bias in these stops, because they found that once the sun went down and it was nighttime, when a person’s ethnicity behind the wheel is a little harder to discern, … that the stop rates for Black individuals dropped.”
This is just one reason for the disproportionate number of people of color within the criminal justice system, Higuera said. Those disparities are evident in Santa Barbara County, too, but the data can be challenging to root out, he added.
In response to a community member’s question about whether enhancements are charged against people of color disproportionately to white people for comparable offenses in the county, Higuera said the county’s data is “not quite there yet.”
“What I can say is that our clientele is about 75 percent people of color,” Higuera continued. “So prosecution and enhancements are going to affect people of color more often than white people just by sheer numbers, that they represent more defendants.”
According to Data USA, white people make up nearly 44 percent of Santa Barbara County’s population.
One way the local criminal justice system is lowering incarceration is through mental health diversion, according to public defender and panelist Rebecca Seldin.
“Currently I am the treatment court attorney in South County,” Seldin said at the meeting. “Once [cases have] been diverted into mental health diversion, I follow them along, I help the client along as they progress through treatment and hopefully, ideally, graduate from the program successfully, terminate their case.”
Seldin said, in her experience, local judges are “very receptive to mental health diversion.”
“I’ve had a number of folks that have graduated from the program earning a dismissal of their case and expungement of the charge,” Seldin said. “So that’s going really well. I hope to see it expand more.”
Adrian Galvan, current co-chair of the Racial Justice Committee and a local public defender, emphasized that the committee “seeks to work with the community,” but does not seek to “substitute its agenda for anyone else’s.”
“There are amazing organizations who are on the ground combating systemic racism and racial inequity,” Galvan said. “They are the specialists. The Racial Justice Committee is another tool that we as an ally, and as advocates, can provide.”
This article appears in Feb 11-18, 2021.