Oakland police, long criticized for using traffic violations to search and interrogate people of color, are trying something new: They’ve dramatically cut back on enforcement.

Officers are declining to pull people over in most cases for low-level infractions like a broken windshield or taillight. They might not even stop motorists for rolling through a stop sign, if no one is crossing the street and the car doesn’t pose an imminent threat to public safety, said police Capt. Christopher Bolton.

Instead, the police are focused on more serious violations and people they’ve identified as potential suspects or witnesses.

“They’re becoming more sophisticated,” said Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University who has worked with Oakland Police for years to curb racial bias and mend a corrosive relationship with residents.

During 2018, the first full year of the program, the number of “discretionary” stops — the ones initiated by an officer, not a call for service — dropped precipitously: from 31,528 in 2017 to 19,900 last year. The racial disparity changed only marginally, with African Americans making up 61% of motorists stopped in 2017 and 55% in 2018. White people, by contrast, accounted for 9% of stops last year and 11% this year.

City leaders see signs of progress. Opponents fear the police have loosened their standards for traffic enforcement in a city famous for sideshows and road mayhem. Advocates are wary, saying it’s not enough for the raw numbers to plummet if African Americans, who represent less than a quarter of Oakland’s population, still account for the majority of people stopped.

More Information 36.9% Drop in “discretionary” stops by Oakland police officers from 2017 to 2018, including a 43.3% decrease in stops of African American motorists.

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Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick touts the approach as innovative and forward-thinking. She knows of no other department in the nation that is deliberately reducing traffic stops, and Eberhardt said the same.

“This is a really big deal in American policing,” Kirkpatrick said on a recent morning. She was sitting at a conference table in the downtown police administration building, surrounded by eight members of her executive staff. Kirkpatrick was hired two years ago to clean up the department after a series of scandals, but many of her assistants have been around for decades.

Oakland is struggling to improve the reputation of its police force, which has been under the direct control of a federal judge and court monitor since 2012. That arrangement stems from a 2003 settlement of a class-action lawsuit that alleged beatings and corruption by a group of West Oakland officers who called themselves the Riders.

For years the department stumbled, grabbing headlines for officer-involved shootings, use of force and a near-total unraveling in 2016, when several officers allegedly sexually exploited a teenage sex-trafficking victim. Relations between the police and Oakland’s African American community steadily eroded, and many black residents felt they were under siege by officers who constantly stopped and harassed them — sometimes for reasons that went unexplained. In 2016, Stanford researchers released a report that analyzed 28,000 stops, and found that Oakland police are far more likely to stop and search black drivers or pedestrians than white ones.

The findings didn’t surprise 45-year-old John Jones III, who said he has been pulled over so many times that he no longer drives in Oakland. Jones said he ditched his last car after a particularly traumatic stop in 2015, when several officers approached his vehicle with guns drawn. Now he gets around by hailing rides from Lyft.

Jones is a member of the watchdog group Oakland Coalition for Police Accountability, which is calling for more transparency and fair practices from law enforcement. He says police officials are overselling the new traffic stop data and being too quick to congratulate themselves.

“They’ve been trying to do this spin that fewer black people are being stopped ... and I’m not buying it,” Jones said. He suspects that racial bias is so deeply embedded in police work, that an agency can’t expect to solve the problem just by stopping fewer people.

Others applaud the strategy, pointing to a steep drop in the number of African American motorists pulled over last year — 10,874, compared with 19,185 in 2017.

The police have also reduced pedestrian stops of all races from 2,813 last year to 2,133 so far this year, and bicycle stops from 507 in 2017, to 352 last year and 86 so far this year. Roughly half of this year’s bicycle stops were based on “intelligence,” meaning the officer had evidence to link the person to a crime.

“Officers changed their standard and started using evidence of wrongdoing instead of intuition,” said Eberhardt, who led the research team that produced the 2016 report. That change “led to a dramatic fall in the number of stops they made,” she said.

Stanford researchers have studied the impact of race on traffic stops throughout the country, building a large database as part of its Stanford Open Policing Project.

In Oakland, police are learning to use a scalpel instead of a hammer. The old approach, called “hot-spot policing” was to saturate areas known for serious or violent crime. Having police heavily concentrated in one place meant more opportunities for those officers to see violations and confront people, Bolton said.

“For example, right now we’re having issues with auto burglaries,” he said. In the past, 100 officers might have swarmed an area and stopped every vehicle that rolled through a stop sign, hoping to get lucky and catch a thief.

“Let’s take that same problem today with an intelligence-led policing model,” Bolton said. “Now, perhaps we have a surveillance to look for specific vehicles. We know that there’s a silver BMW. Or a white sedan. Or a person who is described as ‘this.’ Or we’re looking for precursor activities that are tied to auto burglary. We’re stopping far (fewer) people and ... having a higher success rate at identifying the right person, as opposed to throwing a net out.”

Last year, Bolton began a separate experiment in North Oakland, directing officers to stay within their beats when they conducted traffic stops that weren’t based on intelligence. He calls the concept “beat integrity.” Results so far are encouraging, with the number of stops of black people decreasing from 129 in September 2017 to 70 in September last year, and 21 during the same month this year.

Some Oakland residents and community groups are skeptical, saying police officers have a duty to stop anyone who is breaking any law, no matter how small.

“Look, I do not support racial profiling, but I don’t know if this is the best way to solve it,” said Carl Chan, chair of the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council in Chinatown — a downtown neighborhood with lots of children and senior citizens, and several busy intersections.

Residents of other neighborhoods are also desperate for more traffic enforcement. It doesn’t have to mean an influx of police officers, said Nidya Baez, an assistant principal at Fremont High School in East Oakland. She suggested that police educate people about the dangers of speeding and swerving. Every day, cars tear past the school on Foothill Boulevard. One hit a student this year. He should be planning for graduation — instead, he’s in a coma.

On Grizzly Peak, a curvy road that stretches through the Oakland hills, residents have long complained about cars and motorcycles that barrel through at 50 mph.

“If the police would just arrest a couple people for speeds that are outrageous, that might actually allow a sign to go up that says ‘radar-enforced,’” said Joseph Whitehouse, a member of the Grizzly Peak Neighborhood Association.

Officials in the Police Department assure they still pull people over for speeding or other forms of reckless driving. The number of fatal and injury collisions in the city fell to 2,034 in the 12 months through June 2018 from 2,169 a year earlier, according to city figures.

“Speeding, running red lights, reckless driving, which put the public at harm and at risk — those are things we do prioritize,” said Assistant Police Chief Darren Allison.

“There are still times where low-level stops will occur,” said Deputy Chief Leronne Armstrong. “If it’s nighttime and somebody’s taillight is out, and I’m driving behind that car.”

Oakland police stress that they are reshuffling priorities — they’re not abandoning low-level stops altogether. They still haven’t convinced City Councilman Noel Gallo, who chairs the Public Safety Committee. His Fruitvale district abuts Alameda, where traffic enforcement is a lot more strict, he said.

“I grew up in Oakland, and everyone knew that when you went to Alameda, the speed limit in the whole city is 25 mph,” Gallo said. “And guess what? The minute we cross that bridge to Alameda, we are all driving 25. And then we crossed the bridge back to Oakland, and we’d say, ‘You know what? You can drive 90 if you want to.’”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan