Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Profilers

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-28/audit-of-california-law-enforcement-finds-extreme-bias-among-officers-goes-unchecked

The Title is pure theft; stolen from Ronan Farrow. Only the second clause applies, i.e. Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Profilers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-death-of-words/ 

These comments are based on a Draft 2023 RIPA Report that was prepared in November 2023. Each page of that draft report ended with this caveat:

DRAFT REPORT – PENDING EDITING AND REVIEW

This draft is a product of various subcommittees of the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board. It has been provided merely for the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board’s consideration and its content does not necessarily reflect the views of any individual RIPA Board member, the full RIPA Board, or the California Department of Justice.

In the interests of truth and transparency, I hope that the final 2023 RIPA Report shall have undergone substantial revisions before it reaches the colleagues and stockholders. For things are much worse than are reported in the Draft; a document that dodges most of the unpleasant numbers and trends.

The Draft report begins with a dodge. It begins with the RIPA Mandate but forsakes the opportunity to disclose that POST, the sister-agency that trains and certifies peace-officers, rejects the notion of Racial Profiling; something found in the bowels of the 2023 Draft, at a place above page 270.

The dodges occur in other places too, the important places. It is virtually impossible to determine disparities for the vast majority of the over 40 Stop Actions, Stop Reasons and Stop Results. Instead of clarity we are greeted with a morass of indecipherable arcane terms, terms not used by normal or everyday people.  I cannot use the 2023 RIPA Report, or its Disparity Appendix, to determine disparities, at the LEA level, or for all LEAs. We are shown Coefficients, Observations and Adjusted R values are inefficient in the communication of useful facts, to ordinary folk. We do have a deluge of Regression Statistics in a report that said to be meant for public consumption. I say, this statistical "arcanery" produces or seems intended to produce chicanery, for few will understand statistical Coefficients, Observations and Adjusted R values. As compared to the foregoing, everyone would be able to understand that statewide, on average, Blacks are subjected to use of force around eleven (11) times as often as Whites.

In the interests of fairness, at other times, the Draft reads like a Mea Culpa, so much so that it embarrasses. Seven years on, the CA-DOJ/RIPA Advisory Board has recognized that POST, the organization that trans police, does not believe that Racial Profiling exists, and teaches that.

And now, after three reports that extolled the "Gold" standard that is the Veil of Darkness Hypothesis, that madness has been discontinued. The pandemic has exposed the fallacy upon which its foundational premise is based.  CA-DOJ/RIPA Advisory Board, forced by facts, has come to the realization that Blacks and Hispanics do not have the same driving or commuting patterns as Whites and Asians; something always obvious in diurnal stop rates.

In early 2022, I wrote saying that The RIPA Advisory Board, as then constituted, was Fatally Flawed and Unfit for Purpose. This year, I have no pithy, catchy phrases or expressions to describe the current dire state of affairs. However, the auditor for the State of California has come up with an unimpeachable expression and description. The California State Auditor wrote that things are getting worse, in the area of Racial Profiling, and there is no plan to address the matter. There is no arguing with that. This figure, one that shows all data supplied by the California Department of Justice, includes data collected in 2022, in one page demonstrates what the California State Auditor is said to have asserted. Yes, things have gone from bad to worse.

Lies: The data collected by the largest LEAs (LASO,LAPD & SDPD), in the most populous counties in California, has been proven to be false.

RIPA Data, as reported for 2021, is a lie. With confidence, we can say the same for all years since 2018. This comes as no surprise. I warned the RIPA Advisory Board that it would be so. The RIPA Advisory Board, no matter what it claims, ignores suggestions that come from Black people.

 The California State Auditor is not alone. Others have noticed and made public similar facts, including the doctoring of data. "Others" that include The Los Angeles City Auditor, The Los Angeles County Auditor or OIG,  and The San Diego City Auditor. Some, perhaps most, have lacked the courage to say what data-doctoring means; what it affects.

It affects everything: every report and calculation, some of which have an impact on recommendations that are made to the California legislature, and other agencies. I commend the California Department of Justice, for, at long last, it has assembled the reserves of courage to address the global issues, as are evident in all LASO data, beginning in 2018, although it does so slyly. The "Department" correctly acknowledged that biased-reporting affects disparities, at around page 30 of the Draft 2023 RIPA Report, with these words:

As such, these issues may have persisted into the 2021 data collection period. If such trends continued with the 2021 data, then some disparities across identity groups may actually be larger than shown within the RIPA data discussed in this Report. Accordingly, the Board will continue to monitor the reports of external accountability organizations and advocate for the adoption of methods that will serve to increase the accuracy and completeness of stop data collected under RIPA.

Aside from a transparently obvious attempt to sidestep its abject failures to meet its self-imposed responsibilities under RIPA, specifically those of Article 6. Audits and Validation§ 999.229  "The Department" is quite aware that the data-collection failure trends continued in 2021 data, for The LA County OIG told it so. The Department is also quite aware that The San Diego City Auditor has unearthed even worse findings concerning the San Diego Police Department. It did not have to be so.

The California State Auditor

Before the State Auditor issued his findings, we had the office of the Inspector General for Los Angeles County weighing in; weighing in with a report that the California Department of Justice and the RIPA Advisory Board take particular note of the data that came out of one or more agencies in Los Angeles County. On recollection, in a prior year, something somewhat similar came out of some auditor regarding the Los Angeles Police Department. That report and data, data, that particularly affected the gang database so much so that the Los Angeles Police Department has been banned from using, what is said to be, a critically important database (a racist’s cudgel that is used to mangle the future of Black and Brown youth.)

The data from one of the Los Angeles audits, that of the LASD, concluded that not only were there massive numbers of unreported items (almost 60,000) but that those unreported items were racially skewed. In other words, the report claimed that the reporting was in-and-of itself biased. On recollection, the report claimed that something like three (3) out of every (4) four unreported items was connected to or affected a Hispanic person’s interaction with law enforcement. Indeed, visual examination of the data-collections, by the LASD, by year, displays a conspicuous hole in the data.

To its credit, the RIPA Advisory Board, spends substantial time, on some of these things at around page 30 of the 2023 RIPA report:

On June 10, 2022, the Los Angeles County Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report outlining evidence of underreporting of RIPA data by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) for civilian contacts between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.96, 97 Findings indicated that the LASD underreported observation-based98 stops and arrests.99 The report also found that, while observation-based stops of nearly all racial and ethnic groups went underreported in the SACR system, stops of Hispanic/Latine(x) people had a higher probability of going unreported than all other race/ethnicity groups.100 While the data collection period examined by the Los Angeles County OIG differs from that examined within this report, the OIG’s report also discussed how the LASD had not yet implemented changes to rectify deficiencies that contributed towards the underreporting of stops in 2018 and 2019.

As such, these issues may have persisted into the 2021 data collection period. If such trends continued with the 2021 data, then some disparities across identity groups may actually be larger than shown within the RIPA data discussed in this Report. Accordingly, the Board will continue to monitor the reports of external accountability organizations and advocate for the adoption of methods that will serve to increase the accuracy and completeness of stop data collected under RIPA.

The  report's authors came back to these data issues, at around page 107. 

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audited the LAPD’s stop data and body-worn camera videos and concluded that (1) some portion of the disparities observed in stops and the actions taken after stops were the result of pretextual stops; and (2) data indicate these pretextual stops have limited effectiveness in identifying evidence of illegal firearms or other serious crimes.

It is something extremely significant but something that almost avoided disclosure of something equally extremely disturbing, something indicative of Racial Profiling, as defined: A decision of actions to take following a stop, a decision not to report actions taken, searches especially, following a stop: decisions that were disproportionately skewed, by race. But although the subject was not avoided it was presented as something likely rather than something actual. Records for Hispanics were unreported three times as often as for whites.

Most recently, the City Auditor, of the city of San Diego, has asserted that after examining around a million records, there were some 243,000 times where officers were dispatched to encounters where a reportable action was taken but the officers failed to engage their body worn cameras to capture that encounter. It is something mind-boggling because the 243,000 omissions happened over a 12 month period. And they  happened in a Department that ascribes and asserts that unique behaviours of Blacks, peculiar pathologies, I presume, are the cause for outlandish use-of-force results, administered to that group[1]. The data omissions mean, when the totals in the RIPA-reporting period are examined, that no less than 50,000 encounters, by the San Diego Police Department, are unreported under RIPA, during some 12-month period, since there is no 12-month period where more than 190,000 stops were reported. It also means that San Diego's data is unreliable, more unreliable than previously believed, known and claimed.

For the record, the San Diego Police Department, using its own monthly audits and applying somewhat similar procedures, has disclosed similar findings to me, on a somewhat regular basis, which findings have been equally regularly disclosed to the RIPA Advisory Board, but without similar treatment.

All of these things, point to the abject failure of the CA-DOJ/RIPA Advisory Board to follow the law, and accompanying regulations that it was instrumental in crafting, most specifically the representations and rules concerning the validation of data integrity.  I write specifically about:

(b) The Department shall perform data validation on stop data submitted to ensure data integrity and quality assurance. Each reporting agency shall be responsible for ensuring that all data elements, data values, and narrative explanatory fields conform to these regulations and for correcting any errors in the data submission process, and shall do so through the Department’s error resolution process. 

It is indisputable that "The Department" did nothing; none of what it represents or implicitly warrants. However, "The Department" when challenged over its failures, is not reticent in making open or veiled threats. The following illustrates one of many illegal tactics employed by "The Department." Here, we have a requirement that was imposed by "The Department" as a pre-condition for obtaining stop data for the City of Sacramento, last summer.

As a result of my refusal to accede to the requirement(s), outlined above, "The Department" withheld the requested data for several weeks. After the illegal delay, The Department then sought to explain itself with a litany of lies, far too many to mention.

All this is something intolerable and I fear that the tactics and data-results are statewide phenomena. Indeed, the results and trends are what the California State Auditor claims. Yes, we are saddled with biased-reporting on biased-policing, and many knew it would have occurred and was occurring and is something for which there is no plan to address, nothing other than the demonstrated plan for the suppression of dissidents.  Data collection failures, biased-reporting, and data-doctoring is something that The California Department of Justice chose to ignore.  And so here we are.

The California Constitution designates the State's attorney general as the chief law officer of the State.

The attorney general may bring a civil action to eliminate the pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers that deprives any person of rights protected by law or the constitution. However, as is patently clear, the attorney general is not equipped to act, even if he were so inclined. The AG cannot act upon doctored-data.

What has been identified by the aforementioned quasi-regulators is a series of unacceptable practices that no one has been working systematically to change, or to provide remediation to those who have suffered under these practices. Training is not a remedy; most certainly, if it were, it would not be if that training were to be conducted by POST, an execrable outfit saddled with a putrid affronting curriculum. 

The Draft 2023 RIPA Report: the product of fabulists and concealers, has too many defects to mention, and for which only two antidotes exist: The obtaining of analyses from other sources, or a rewrite of the 2023 RIPA Report. With this damning comment, I do not mean to say that there are no redeeming parts, for there are many. It is just that such parts are unrelated to arithmetic.

This overview of RIPA Stop data, as before, must be viewed with all of the foregoing in mind. None of the collection and reporting shortcomings, and other failures are peculiar to Law Enforcement Agencies in Southern California. Indeed, three years ago the OIG, for Oakland, came up with rather similar findings something that I fear is being repeated now, again in Oakland’s quest to escape from under Federal Court Supervision; Oakland's unexplained data-collections are implausible. Likewise, San Francisco’s unbelievable reported stop counts are exactly that; unbelievable. San Francisco has reduced its annualized stop counts from around 108,000 in 2019 to 27,000 in 2021 has excelled itself. It is on-schedule to produce less than 14,000 stops in 2022, even as it caterwauls about spikes in crime. See ‘What exactly are they doing?’: 45 S.F. traffic cops issue just 10 citations combined a day.  Oakland is not far behind. They claim to be stopping around 1/3 as many people as they did 3 years ago, but yet they called on the CHP for help to make more stops.  As may be expected, authorities in both places complain about spikes in crime, documented by nothing, and both groups often blame “defunding the police” movements, despite both places having had police-budget increases.

 

I choose to believe nothing that comes out of either Bay Area place, except with the idea that what computes as bad is probably, in reality, worse, due to reporting bias /a/k/a data-doctoring.

 

The data that I used comes mostly from the California Department of Justice. The sole exception is local data, i.e. data from The City of San Diego Police Department. There are over 12 million stop records. 

California Department of Justice-provided data has recently grown increasingly strange, in that it has increasingly been other than reported or disclosed, and the  California Department of Justice has gone selectively mute, when not illegally and oppressively demanding that I subject myself to Government Monitoring, as a precondition for obtaining data. But over and beyond those things, the California Department of Justice has flat refused to provide data critical to data analysis, while making patently spurious claims that betray incompetence and or data-ignorance. They have gone so far as to insinuate or imply that the data-collection tools that the CA-DOJ has built and provided to several large LEAs has been incompetently rendered. Lying leads everyone to unanticipated places.

If you look closely to what the CA-DOJ writes, at around page 30, they are saying that all data, since 2018, is of questionable provenance. I agree,

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive

 

Spies and Lies.

 

In  early summer, this year, I sought the stop records of The Sacramento Police Department for the first six months of this year. After the usual dilation I received a secure email directing me to a secure site from which the data could be fetched. Imagine it. Public Government records being made the subject of cloak and dagger intrigue. After a few button clicks, I faced a screen that required that I agree to Government Monitoring, as precondition, to obtain what I thought was less than 25,000 records.

 

I declined.

 

After an extended period, after much back and forth, the CA-DOJ claimed that the Government Monitoring requirement was made necessary by the size of the file; a file of 25,000 records? I had received regular tranches of 1-2 million records before; unrestricted and un-secured. Only later did I learn that I had been sent almost 900,000 records; 880,000 of which I had not requested, the receipt of which taxed my resources and was burdensome. Only then, did it become clear that the package size – Government Monitoring requirement was a ruse to expand Government Monitoring and to obtain permission for it.

Everything, all items, before and after, are intended to be, and operate as part of a Conspiracy to Protect Profilers

 The Executive Summary of the 2023 report is agnostic to or does not consider deserving of mention Asians and people who are not members of the big five (5). It summarizes stop findings as follows:

 FINDINGS REGARDING RIPA STOP DATA • Agencies reported over 3.1 million stops during the stop data collection period, with the California Highway Patrol conducting the most stops of any single agency (54.9%). •

 Individuals perceived to be

• Hispanic/Latine(x) (42.4%),
• White (30.7%), or
• Black (15.0%) comprised the majority of stopped individuals.

My findings differ, in part, because I have included all records since July 1, 2018, through and including September 30, 2022. My selection includes records from around 440 LEAs that have reported data for 2022.

 

Even when filtered to 2021, Whites have a greater percentage, and Hispanics a lower percentage, than is RIPA-reported. It is something quite flabbergasting and something that seems contrived; something that seems fudged. I assert that only these people have the courage to claim the perceived whites are ten (10%) points lower than Hispanics. 

Whatever its source those values (White 30.7% and Hispanic 42.4%) were not fetched from data.  

The people who are claimed to be perceived as White, in the 2023 Draft Report, I claim, are perceived as such for some strange purpose: certainly not to diminish the computation of disparities to Whites. Irrespective of which population profile is used (and the CA-DOJ should use that used by the California Secretary of State) Whites shall have been said, or implied, to have been stopped far less than population presence, and Hispanics around population presence. That shall have driven disparities to Whites UP, across the board. It may seem to be useful, but it is not. It is false. It is inaccurate.

The Fudge Factors

According to the RIPA Draft Report

Stop data classifying the race/ethnicity of stopped individuals is based upon officer perception. Some research indicates that it is more difficult to classify the race of multiracial individuals than it is to classify the race of monoracial individuals and that people may often classify multiracial individuals as monoracial.

The above flies in the face of America's one-drop rule and doubtless accounts for the CA-DOJ's decision to introduce and use a racial classification: Multi-Racial Persons.  A classification that is not defined in the AB 953 Data Dictionary, the use of which would and does drive Black disparities down. Therefore, it is transparently apparent and appropriate for all values that are attributed to multi-Racial people to be combined with those for Black people, in order to get a true picture of Black disparities. Indeed, upon doing so, sometimes, rare times, differences between my computations and those of the CA-DOJ all but disappeared. The lesson of this is that sometimes multi-Racial = Black. I doubt that this is the sort of TRANSPARENCY that is so often touted and promoted by people who claim that they do not know when to activate a body-worn camera.

And, as may be mentioned before, try as I may, I have been unable to find any mention of the San Diego City Auditor's Blockbuster finding that, in a 12 month period, 243,000 time when officers were dispatched to encounters that resulted in actionable (reportable) encounters, the body worn cameras, items acquired at substantial costs, precisely for such occasions, were not activated. in attempting to determine the racial composition of the 243,000 unreported items, I was met by this response from the City of San Diego:

Request Closed 

02a. Released - Redacted

All responsive documents have been released except for portions redacted pursuant to:

Request 22-5814

Closed

 

Some of the records you requested are redacted pursuant to the following Government Code exemptions: 

 

·         Officers’ badge ID numbers and other types of personal identifying information - considered confidential under California Penal Code sections 832.7 and 832.8, and exempt from release under the California Public Records Act pursuant to California Government Code (GC) section 6254(k), California Government Code section 12525.5, California Government Code 6254(f);

 

·         Residential addresses, specifically the street numbers are considered confidential under California Government Code 6254(f); 

 

·         Unit ID is confidential information under California Penal Code sections 832.7 and 832.8, and is exempt from production under the California Public Records Act pursuant to California Government Code section 6254(k);

 

·         Swat staging and location redacted for operational security concerns under California Government Code section 6254(f); and

 

·         And lastly, under California Government Code section 6255, "on the facts of the particular case, the public interest served by nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record." 

 

The person deciding to redact the records is Matthew Helm, Assistant City Auditor, based on discussions and review of the information with City Attorney's Office and talks with SDPD.

November 21, 2022, 3:33pm by Danielle Knighten, Deputy City Auditor

No usable data was provided.

I suppose that the RIPA Advisory Board's non-inclusion of such massive under-reporting, by the San Diego Police Department, and its non-inclusion in the 2023 Report, will eventually be cast as an oversight. If so, it would have been an oversight of  a factual condition that thrashed the SDPD's assertion, embraced by the RIPA Advisory Board and propagated by it,  that "certain people" in "certain places" are more prone to obstructing and assaulting police officers, resulting in and explaining outlandish use-of -force disparities.

Upon reading the draft RIPA Report, I wrote this post. But before pressing the Publish button, for this item, I decided to get the most recent dataset for 2021. I came upon the below and was surprised.

Surprised since the OPENJUSTICE website was said to be down, over 5 days ago:

Because of the above obvious fabrications and gymnastics, although not yet computed, RIPA Reported disparities shall have been substantially lower than I have computed, in my Dashboard Report, a portion of which is shown below.

---

[1] They, the SDPD, just did not manage to capture and therefore measure around 40% of the incidents. It is uncanny how that works. 

The shape is as has been established, over four years, and the trend in stop disparities is ever upward. When stopped, the inability to cite Blacks remains and affluent Asians continue to be milked. Blacks have the highest search rates and provide little reward to the Searchers; less than all. The performance of "Others" seems to be the result of selective data-manipulation; something little understood.

Balance

In discussions about what the report contains, implies, and means, there was much discussion and some support for the idea of "balance", quotes required.  Seeking "balance" in reporting on gross disparities is like arbitration between the fire and the fire brigade. Doubtless, in this context, we know which is which. Why do we need "balance" when we are seeking truth? An argument for balance is akin to claiming that the truth lies halfway between one position and another which opposes it.  Balance is a watering-down, and the report contains far too much of that, much of it concealed. There is no balance in the outrageous disparities.(But see CHP's citations.) Billy clubs and pointed pistols are unbalanced, Fired pistols and unleashed dogs are worse. Statewide, the use of force numbers, and all other adverse outcomes, demonstrate the imbalance.

Some want to converse while the fire burns, the fire brigade does not do that, it trains hoses on the fire. Talk is for later; later, when the fire is put out.

Moreover, the data is unbalanced, it is made unbalanced by false reporting, by some, perhaps many. Certainly, there has been "biased-reporting" by some of the largest LEAs (SDPD, LAPD, LASD, Oakland PD). It has been demonstrated, to the satisfaction of most, that the reporting of data is biased, with the unreported items being disproportionately skewed again those who suffer the greatest disparities. See the report of the OIG for Los Angeles County. The San Diego City Auditor hides racial data while cowering behind a claim that "on the facts of the particular case, the public interest served by nondisclosure clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record."  We should ask the balance advocates to balance or explain that bit of imbalance.

Churchill said, "I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade." The fire brigade is supposed to bring about police reform and for that we need truth, not balance. Let the numbers, the already watered-down, biased-reported numbers, un-reported numbers, numbers that computed unconscionable disparities speak for themselves.

These people are not after the truth, and some of them are after "balance" others want to have conversations, why mostly Black and Borown people are being abused and some of these balancers and conversationalists are hiding if not doctoring data. As Mr. Presley implored, let us have "A little less conversation and a little more action, some firefighting.

Truths

It is tempting to try to ignore the snippets of truth that exist in the 2023 RIPA Stop Report. I will not yield to temptation, because the RIPA Advisory Board,  while keeping the best for last, has devoted almost 20 pages to a lambasting of POST; a lambasting that is deserved and overdue. It and one that reads like an indictment. As much as I have contempt for those who would abolish the police, I have no such sentiment with respect to POST. That they have proven themselves worth of reformation and/ or abolition is a case persuasively made by the RIPA Advisory Board, a Boad that sat on its hands, and  with zippered lips did nothing, while POST embraced a curriculum and definition of Racial Profiling that was, for five years, diametrically opposed to the law. I regret that the RIPA Advisory Board did not say directly, all that is implied by the many pages that are devoted to the POST lambaste.  Nevertheless what the RIPA Advisory Board did say, in the last 20 or so pages of the 2023 Report is recommended reading.

Racial Profiling is a Reality, it is not a Perception.

The RIPA Advisory Board, with the last 20 pages, indicts itself; its sloth and foot-dragging while Backs and Browns were being beaten and killed because of the teachings and contents of POST's  curriculum.

Conclusion

As the California State Auditor says, there is much that is bad, and the trend is to things worse. And as the California State Auditor says, implies, or is reported to have said, the level of Bias requires state-level intervention.

 

More precisely, The California State Auditor says that Ensuring Broader Use of Practices That Address Bias Will Require State-Level Intervention.

To that assertion, I ask by whom? State-Level Intervention by whom? Certainly not the CA-DOJ lot, about or to whom Cromwell could have spoken, some almost 400 years ago:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

To which I add, "And take the rest of the RIPA Advisory Board with you."