Profiling Atherton

goes to show you never know what you'll find when you start digging. Incredible work, OP.

I used to go jogging in Atherton a few times a week and I always wondered about all the cars getting pulled over. I wanna say in all cases it was a Hispanic driver in an older/beat-up car. Never once in the years I lived here have I seen an "expensive" car getting pulled over.

I ended up with renting a mansion in Atherton right off of Fair Oaks for dirt cheap for about a year. If you look at the tickets, a lot of them are on the streets around Fair Oaks since that's also a short path to/from Redwood City and the highway.

I would bet a lot of money that the profiling is done based on the type of car you drive and intended to keep people from Redwood City out of Atherton.

I drive an older Civic and my girlfriend drives a really beat up old Civic. We would get followed home down El Camino and Fair Oaks basically every day. To the point that the police learned that our Civics actually belonged in that Atherton block and then stopped following us after a few months. I had friends come over in expensive cars and hang out and not a single one was followed. I asked them specifically to keep an eye on if they were followed because the profiling was so blatant with me. The expensive cars were never followed.

For what it's worth, I think that's what a lot people in Atherton pay their local government for. They don't want people there who don't live in Atherton. You go to Atherton to get away from people, e.g. lots are massive because you don't want to see your neighbors, and there aren't sidewalks or street lights in most of Atherton because they don't want people walking around at night. Because if you're rich and don't want to see your neighbors, why would you walk around at night? Funnily, the train station is right there too and the Caltrain only stops in Atherton on the weekends because they don't want the poor commuters being able to get in or out of Atherton during the week. So it's not surprising that the data shows the community police force is doing exactly what the community pays them to do - keep people who don't live in Atherton out of the city.

> I have in no way, shape or form "hacked" Atherton or its police department to produce this site.

I think it's sad that the author felt compelled to include that.

It seems pretty natural that if the serious penalties are for being unlicensed drivers (14602.6 VC, the $1800 thing), and most of the unlicensed people have Hispanic names/are Hispanic (which I think is generally true, in California), most of the people who get serious penalties for being unlicensed drivers will be Hispanic. There's no particular racism there on the part of the Atherton police in that. You have to have sufficient cause for a stop (other traffic infraction) to pull someone over in the first place; if the initial infraction isn't worth citing, no big deal. If the initial infraction is valid, but still not worth citing, and the driver is unlicensed, then 14602.6 VC applies. There's no particular way to tell if a driver is unlicensed otherwise, and "I thought he was unlicensed" wouldn't meet the standard of suspicion needed to do a stop, as a result. Even if someone were unlicensed and caught, if you didn't have the cause to stop him for something else, he'd walk on the unlicensed driver charge.

(There's plenty of other racism in society, and maybe in Atherton, but I don't think their traffic stop stats necessarily show it.)

Otherwise, it seems like a pretty amazing place to live. A little far from SF, perhaps, so there's a point in Hillsborough's favor, but if I could afford it, I'd be in Atherton or Hillsborough for sure. Maybe Woodside as an outside choice.