Oakland council members pushed forward guidelines Tuesday that would limit when police can search people on probation and parole — a move that drew a sharp rebuke from community members who said it didn’t go far enough.

The city’s public safety committee on Tuesday evening rejected a more restrictive recommendation from the Oakland Police Commission that would have required officers to have “reasonable suspicion” that a person on probation or parole was committing a crime before police could search the person or their property.

The council, instead, backed a draft proposal on searches written by the Oakland Police Department. That plan will advance to the full City Council for a vote.

Under state law, officers can conduct warrantless searches for anyone on parole and those on probation with a search clause.

The proposal approved by the public safety committee advises officers to refrain from immediately asking if a person is on probation or parole, and requires officers to document, in writing, why they believed a person was involved in a crime when they search people on probation or parole for a non-violent offense.

The policy is intended to rebuild community trust in a city with a tortured history of race and police relations. Researchers have found that police searches are viewed as intrusive, and can fracture a department’s trust in the community.

“We at the Oakland Police Department have put some restrictions on our officers, in our policy, that are some of the most restrictive requirements throughout the state,” Assistant Chief LeRonne Armstrong told the committee.

Several community members urged the committee to accept the commission’s version of the policy over Oakland police’s.

“The changes I made to this policy are simple, yet so meaningful,” said Thomas Lloyd Smith, chair of the Oakland Police Commission.

“Reasonable suspicion must be used when conducting these searches, not probable cause, which is a higher standard,” he said. “If any of you walk around the street, you would not expect to be stopped for no reason whatsoever.”

Police officials contend that the commission’s revisions went too far and would hurt public safety. They point to data that shows police recovered 80 firearms after traffic stops and searches of people on probation and parole, between Jan. 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018.

“Under the version of the policy recommended by the Commission, these 80 illegal firearms would not have been recovered,” Oakland police wrote in their supplemental report.

“Individualized reasonable suspicion is the standard applied to individuals not on probation or parole,” the Oakland police report states. This proposed requirement, it said, “removes a valuable tool from officers in addressing and reducing violent crime…”

But community activists flipped the department’s own statistics, and argued that most of the police’s searches came up empty. Of the more that 4,000 probation or parole searches that came from a traffic stop, only 2 percent resulted in the discovery of a firearm, Henry Gage, an activist with the Coalition for Police Accountability.

“Policy as currently drafted has created a guessing game,” he said. “(Data) shows that OPD is a remarkably bad guesser.”

Oakland police drafted the new policy following a 2016 report by Stanford University Professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who found that the city’s officers were far more likely to stop black drivers and pedestrians than white ones. The report included recommendations to narrow the disparities, which included reviewing search policies and defining how and when officers should ask if someone’s on probation or parole.

The report noted that 93 percent of probation and parole searches were of African American or Hispanic people.

Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy