A new report from the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office finds that San Francisco’s new pretext-stop policy, which restricts officers from making traffic stops based on pretextual reasons, significantly reduces harmful police-driver interactions without compromising public safety. Matt Graham, Senior Data Analyst at CPE, spoke with Mission Local about how the report data did not support the idea that pretextual stops help reduce crime.
Notably, after police union resistance to ending pretextual stops over claims that the policy would jeopardize their ability to keep “dangerous criminals” off the streets, that has not happened: Crime was down almost 44 percent from 2023 to 2025.
“This idea that pretext stops help crime go down, the data just doesn’t support that,” added Matthew Graham, senior data analyst with Center for Policing Equity and an author of the report.
The full article can be found on Mission Local’s website.