The Beverly Hills Police Department is being sued over allegations of racial profiling. The plaintiffs' attorney Ben Crump said a task force created by the department to patrol Rodeo Drive has almost exclusively arrested Black people for alleged criminal violations.
The plaintiffs, Jasmine Williams and Khalil White, said they were participating in a demonstration in Beverly Hills in Sept. 2020, advocating for greater accountability for police misconduct, when they were arrested by officers with BHPD’s Operation Safe Street, also known as the Rodeo Drive Task Force.
According to the complaint, Williams and White were both riding electric scooters through the city around the time of the protest. They said they were detained by BHPD officers on the basis of no "reasonable suspicious or probable cause."
Electric scooters were banned within Beverly Hills city limits through Nov. 2020. However, the ban arose from a city council ordinance, and it is not clear that violating such a rule would necessitate arrest or criminal prosecution.
Officers reportedly demanded identification from the pair to run through "BHPD's criminal database." Williams and White said they declined, stating no crime has been committed and the officers were "abusing their police powers."
Still, the plaintiffs eventually provided BHPD officers with identification. They said they were nevertheless handcuffed and placed under arrest on "multiple fabricated charges."
In a statement, Beverly Hills Police Chief Dominick Rivetti said the plaintiffs were warned earlier that day that riding a scooter on the sidewalk in Beverly Hills was prohibited at that time, and that no "enforcement action" was taken.
When committing the same violation later the same day and also providing false information to a police officer, Mr. White and Ms. Williams were taken into custody.
According to the suit, prosecutors eventually dropped the case. But Crump characterized his clients' arrests as symptoms of a broader problem within the department.
“The Beverly HIlls Police Department has a lengthy and documented history of racial profiling and targeting Black and brown people,” Crump said in a statement.
He noted that the Rodeo Drive Task Force arrested 106 individuals from March 2020 and July 2021. Of those arrested, 106 were Black, one was Latino. The complaint alleged that the crimes connected with these arrests were "fabricated," and minor—such as jaywalking.
"If a white person engaged in such acts, he or she would not have been arrested," it stated.
According to Crump’s co-counsel, Bradley C. Gage, patterns of discriminatory conduct by BHPD officers date back to 1995, when a group of Black teenagers filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city after they were stopped and allegedly harassed by police. Former BHPD Chief Sandra Spagnoli retired in 2020 amid a flurry of lawsuits that alleged she made racist remarks and harassed employees.
The lawsuit also named BHPD Capt. Scott Dowling. The plaintiffs alleged he directed officers to “seize, interrogate, use force, falsely arrest and maliciously prosecute any African Americans who traveled on Rodeo Drive” in order to “keep out African Americans, who were deemed as 'criminals.'”
Relatedly, Dowling is alleged to have referred in private to Black people as “lazy” and reportedly laughed after watching a video produced by two BHPD officers in 2015 that mocked Black and Asian people.