1) Most Hispanic people in the Bay Area are US citizens or lawful residents, and licensed (and pay taxes, and are otherwise generally representative of everyone else). We're talking about the set of people who get caught for unlicensed/suspended, which is already a pretty small subset, and not representative of the overall population at all.

However, most unlicensed people are that way due to immigration status, which is almost entirely Hispanic people (since our illegal immigrants are essentially all Mexican or Guatemalan). Suspended license people are often DUI or other things like that, which I'd assume is much more universal. I don't know the breakdown between unlicensed and suspended; generally I think suspended/revoked are punished more harshly than unlicensed, partially because you have to be a fuckup to get your license suspended in the first place, and it's a bit more willful to continue driving at that point. If there were no legal way to get a license, it's a lot more morally defensible to drive anyway (although, insurance...); fortunately CA seems to make it possible to get a license anyway, so failing to do so is an affirmatively lame action.

2) No -- I meant if you wanted to prosecute someone for the unlicensed, but your PC to stop him originally was bad (i.e. you claimed he ran a red light, but it turns out he didn't), the court would let him walk (rather, it'd never go to trial).

If a cop had legitimate PC to stop, and then stopped and found suspended license, the cop would almost certainly cite/arrest/whatever for the suspended license.

Those are two entirely different cases. (It's pretty easy to generate legitimate PC to pull ~anyone over, though, due to how the vehicle code is written and how people actually drive.)

(Another unanswered question is "is there a variation in vehicle maintenance or driving rule compliance in different race/ethnicity drivers?" -- I tend to think there isn't. Even if you wanted to go by rich/poor, I've even seen plenty of expensive cars with maintenance issues, and obnoxious rich people with huge numbers of bikes on bike racks obscuring license plates, unsecured loads, etc. The only real distinction I've seen is that pickup truck drivers, in general, are the cause of almost all object-in-road problems.)

Ok, after reading your response, I was somewhat confused, and now looking at the code, it seems like the drivers licenses are done in California is quite a bit different than here, in Australia.

It seems that in California, at least, there is a legal distinction between a 'revoked' license and being 'unlicensed'.

In Australia, AFAIK there's no distinction; if you commit an offence serious enough to have your license revoked, then you no longer have a license and are unlicensed; i.e. it's the license that gives you the right to drive, and if your license is revoked then you don't have a license any more.

It's the same deal for suspensions - in Australia, if your license is suspended, then you're by definition unlicensed for the period.

So there may be a semantic mismatch where I misunderstood you.

It would seem that in California, pretty much the only way you could get a 12500(a) is if you'd never held a license at all; in this case, it fits your assertion that Hispanics are the only _unlicensed_ drivers.

There are a tiny number of people who don't get licenses because they don't believe the state should have the authority to license them, and maybe a few others who don't because they're otherwise on the run for other crimes (but never got a license), and others who have licenses but are living under other identities (which isn't strictly illegal; only if it's being done to defraud. If you thought MS-13 was out to kill you, it might be prudent to give up your identity, including your license, assume another identity, and thus be "unlicensed")

There are also people who have non-valid licenses by being in-state for a long time with another state license, or perhaps a foreign license (i.e. they had a UK license, came to the US for a long time, failed to correctly get a CA license when they were able to do so.)

But those are all in the statistical noise, I think, vs. undocumented immigrants who either can't get licenses (most states) or don't (because they're afraid CA DMV will turn their records over to DHS ICE, I guess?)

It's a "all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are not squares".

Hispanics are statistically far more likely to be illegals and thus unlicensed or uninsured. The problem is, most people of hispanics are 100% legal. Some have ancestors that have been in California since before it was a US territory.