Data Availability, Data Integrity and Other Fictions

 

 

In the within, I wrote about the mayhem or “rodgering” caused by “Consensual Encounters Resulting in a Search” when searches were not conducted, and other forms of fiction that compose much of California Department of Justice-provided Stop Data. Outside of this, I have importuned the CA-DOJ about its misrepresentations in claiming to have complied with the legal requirements contained in Article 6. Audits and Validation, § 999.229 of AB953. Included in my rants were regular references to the admonitions of Chief Medrano, a current employee of the CA-DOJ; the clearest that I have heard on the matter of Data Integrity, Auditing and Validation.

 

Early this year, or late last year, I found occasion to adjure the CA-DOJ on the matter again. In that adjuration I referred to the participation of CA-DOJ’s own personnel in the publication of an excellent discourse, rather a manual, on Stop Data Collection. It is a document that, by definition, incorporates procedures meant to ensure Data Integrity. Persons in the employ of the California Department of Justice contributed to a document that said, amongst other correct things:

 

 

Automation can preserve time when officers are entering data and when command staff are reviewing data; it can also generally reduce errors. Our broad suggestions for implementing automation are as follows:

• Integrate stop data collection with existing systems (e.g., dispatch, records management) to facilitate auto-population and minimize copying errors.
• Enable the system to retain core information about a stop, such as location, time, date, and officer information, and automatically populate these data for multiple-person stops.38
• Build logic into the system that prevents conflicting answers or flags errors (e.g., an improbable date) for the officer entering data.
• Use geocoding technology to formalize recording of address fields (e.g., suggest a geocodable location when an officer enters an approximate or incorrect address).
• Build in standard checks for personnel who are conducting audits to compare certain fields and look for glaring inconsistencies (e.g., search = incident to lawful arrest; arrest = no).

 

The California Department of Justice, using mandatorily reported data, databases to which it has access, and data to which is has or may easily obtain access, including Arrests, Citations, Uses of Force, Cal Gang (for Field Interviews) etc., can emulate much of the above, and should have. It has not. There are problems in having good data: it makes people accountable. I assert that had Calgang been audited its integrity would not remain in question, and perhaps the LAPD would not be forbidden to use it, as have all leas been forbidden to use LAPD’s CalGang entries.

 

In a conversation, with CA-DOJ employees, Audra Opdyke, Erin Choi, and Nancy Beninati, concerning these things, and others, from around 2020, I pointed out that since around 60% of Vehicle stops result in Citations, and that perhaps 5% of all stops result in arrests, that 65% could be validated, easily, using citation and arrest records. I put it to them that if 65% of data is found valid it is likely that the remaining 35-40% is valid too.

 

Validating Citations and Arrests is something that I do regularly, with SDPD data, perhaps every six months.

My efforts were futile, and in that they were matched in futility by the authoring efforts of CA-DOJ colleagues : Randie Chance, Jenny Reich, Kevin Walker, Trent Simmons, and Amanda Burke.

 

In the May 31 2023, State and Local Racial & Identity Profiling Policies Meeting, we had what can be watched and heard here: https://youtu.be/gFm2uF2QrSM?t=2622

 

It is utter nonsense, and the nonsense is not limited to the claim of the absence of resources to “individually audit law enforcement agencies.” I daresay that what is being said goes beyond nonsense; I assert that it is part of a lie that has been told, year after year, since 2018. This repeatedly told lie from Article 6, § 999.229:

 

(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.

 

If you watch and listen, you will also notice a suggestion that the board could develop guidelines for agencies to self-audit. The RIPA board need go no further than what CA-DOJ have written in the COPS Guidebook. I was compelled to stop watching what seemed like rank dishonesty.

 

I would be remiss, if I were not to again mention that the SDPD has self-audited for at least 5 years. By accumulation over the years, the SDPD has found and documented reporting failures affecting around 12-13% of Field interviews and around 6% of Arrests and Citations, respectively. Nothing has been fixed/corrected.

 

California Department of Justice-provided data is tripe, hole-filled and hole-drilled tripe. The California Department of Justice has known for years just how to minimize (not eliminate) the rot. Much of what I learned from the US Department of Justice, and ranted about, is incorporated into a document that was authored, in part,  by CA-JOJ employees: Randie Chance, Jenny Reich, Kevin Walker, Trent Simmons and Amanda Burke.  That document, written in or around 2020, is available at https://policingequity.org/images/pdfs-doc/COPS-Guidebook_Final_Release_Version_2-compressed.pdf.

 

There is a perverse utility to having bad data, and doubtless the California Department of Justice knows it. That they do and use that utility is a disgrace.