Even More Fatally Flawed And Still Unfit for Purpose or The Great Distraction

Subject: RIPA Advisory Board – More Fatally Flawed and Still Unfit for Purpose 

I wanted to wait until I came into possession of the actual 2025 Annual RIPA Report, before writing this, but I found myself between a rock and a hard place. My strongest motivator was fear; fear of reading a newspaper or web-account of the RIPA results or seeing a TV Broadcast that is ruled by lies and/or happy talk. I remember last year too well.  I also feared that, as was the case with the reports from the last few years, the RIPA Report, to which the press has early or immediate access, would not become available to me for several days.  Because of that, I decided to write this.

 

“Racial Discrimination is an inference that may be drawn from Racial Disparities.” In the absence of other inferences, or plausible explanations, our choices become limited.

 

There is an abundance of racial disparities to be found in RIPA data. I am unaware of any adverse disparity that has diminished anywhere. I looked to the California Department of Justice to verify validate or dispute my findings, but that was a no-go zone, for despite the AG writing this, on December 18, 2024:

The RIPA Board’s most recent report analyzed more than 4.5 million stops made in 2022 and found that there continues to be stark racial disparities among those stopped. 

Two weeks later, his department, the CA-DOJ, together with the RIPA Advisory Board, produced a report that showed none of the "stark" dispatities, or only ferrets could find them, for they were well-hidden.

All that follows is relentlessly grim; Racial Profiling is a grim business that produces grim products.

 

I learn through repetition. Some of the following comments are repetitions from more than two years ago when my screed was entitled Fatally Flawed and Unfit for Purpose. However, even though these comments refer to, and may seem to focus on 2023 data, they are informed by more the around 21 million records collected since July 2018 through December 25, 2024. Indeed, when charts and graphs are displayed, the time series types use every bit of available data. Yes, some of it comes from 2024.  Data for 2024 is primarily from the LAPD,  but we do have some 2024 data from around 40 other LEAs.

I hold that the 2025 RIPA Annual Report shall be a diversion; one intended to distract us from the devastating findings of "stark disparities", from last year where we saw:

1. Obscene disparities, and
2. Massive data anomalies, including un-reported and/or ma-reported stop records, affecting 17% of the then around 540 reporting agencies.

Even though, from time to time, I and other RIPA Meeting attendees did get access to more than mere snippets of the 2025 RIPA Annual Report, I was still left wondering what sort of withheld madness --Lying By Omission-- remained in store for the public, come January 1, 2025. I was gravely disconcerted when CJIS was granted authority to modify numerical results after approval for report publication was granted. That madness should never occur anywhere, especially not here. Additionally, I would have written this earlier and provided more updated results, but my lawful request for data was unlawfully withheld and explained by an unnessary lie.

The authors of that RIPA Report seem to be embarrassed by facts, especially data facts. If embarrassed they have good reason, because the findings of the SF DPA shall not be peculiar: It is not a one-of; it is widespread statewide; the LAPD having numerous documented recent instances. And when not using the chicanery of the arcane in presented results, The Annual RIPA Report shall have featured/selected an "un documentable" distraction, but one that makes for interesting discussion or contemplation: The Effect of Police Interactions with Youth.  That is the focus of the 2025 report.  Field Interviews, the preeminent document produced by interactions with youth, are only conditionally reportable.

I do not like diversions or distractions, especially those that have little or no empirical basis, so let me begin with a summary of reported-data facts for the most concerning issues. We will get to the grim, but still whimsical, distractions later; later in the blog post from which this was extracted; perhaps not much later.

On the basis of around 21 Million RIPA-reported but mostly unverified records that have been reported since July 1, 2018, using the most recent population percentages for the jurisdictions of the reporting agencies:

• Reported stops have rebounded to almost pre-pandemic levels for many large LEAs.
• Reported stops for many large LEAs continue to be marred by computed/forcasted and visible data anomalies that call into question the accuracy, reliability and representativeness of RIPA- reported data.
• Despite its legal obligation to verify the integrity of RIPA-reported data, now for the sixth succeding year, the CJIS of the CA-DOJ has failed to meet that obligation; with catastrophic effect: more than 600,000 rows of data show persons being classified as multi-racial, in RIPA-reported data, while none of those persons appear as multi-racial, in separately-fetched Citation or Arrest records. So far, The RIPA Advisory Board only acknowledges the presence of 9 (nine) such records.
• If there has been dimunition in any of the prime disparities, in any place, this writer has not seem them.
• Using population percentages for jurisdictions of the reporting agencies, Blacks are stopped around 4.60 more often than Whites, Hispanics less than half that.
• Blacks are released without action more than 5 times as often as Whites, Hispanics less than half that.
• Blacks are subjected to force more than 6 times as often as Whites, Hispanics around 2.4 times as often
• Asians continue to operate as milch cows, seeminly for revenue-producing Citations; unless you believe that Asians are particularly bad drivers. Asians are ticketed at a rate that is around 10 points higher than all others.Whites are the next most cited group. The results for the CHP, a LEA documented as having officers with particular disdain for Asians, seem especially egregious. According to a study conducted last year, Blacks and Hispanics tend to be targeted for equipment Violations, These stops are less likely to result in citations than stops of white and Asian drivers, possibly because white and Asian drivers are mostly stopped by police when they are engaging in moving violations that endangers themselves or others.
• Whites are also put-upon, where they are a minority, but not to the same extent as Blacks or Hispanics.
• Even though Blacks are searched a substantially higher rates than all others-- around 7X the rate of Whites-- discovery rates a/k/a "Hit Rates" for Blacks are consistently lower than those of Whites and Asians.
• Pretext Stop Results, available only for the LAPD, show that that particular voluntary abatement program is no panacea. LAPD has elected to act in adverse ways, towards Blacks, at around twice the odious disparity rates for garden variety stops. Hispanics fare better; their disparites are around1/3 those of Blacks.

With respect to multiracials, despite defining or describing multiracials in the Statutorily Mandate Tables.PDF, Table 7, for 2023, as:

This table displays the number of stops each agency reported grouped by the perceived race/ethnicity of the individuals stopped. Officers can select up to eight different race/ethnicity categories when recording these data for individuals stopped. Frequency counts corresponding to each single race/ethnicity group represent those individuals where officers only selected a single race/ethnicity category. The multiracial group includes all stops where officers selected multiple racial/ethnic categories

Again, The RIPA Board saw fit to mention that there were only 9 persons having all seven racial categories selected in 2023 data. That bit of beguilement was false too, but the use of partial truths is not limited to the CJIS. San Francisco claims that it had 111 persons having all seven racial categories selected in 2023 data. Both are obviously wrong or deceptive. I claim instead that statewide there were at least 90,000 multi-racial entries in 2023. This number translates into around 30,000 persons, none of whom likely were recorded as multi-racial in other databases. I did not find any.

Do not trust the 2025 RIPA Report when it appears, for as far as I know, nothing in, or about, it has been verified; certainly not the stop data. This core RIPA responsibility has not been met, and millions of records have been impinged upon; The SF DPA's disappointing and unsurprising results only accounts for a quarter million of them:

 Article 6. Audits and Validation § 999.229 (a) 

 (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  

---

[1][1] Sanctioned is a double-edged word; a double-edged sword.

[2] Multi-racial individuals, around 600,000 data rows of them have found no matches in Citation, Arrest records of those police interactions. Sine the past is the best predictor of the present, a reasonable conclusion is that persons are deemed multi-racial for RIPA reporting purposes only. Those persons are of a single race/ethnicity when cited, arrested.

Lying By Obfuscation

On page 7 of the Draft Report, this passage appears:

Examining the proportion of individuals stopped by their race/ethnicity identity in relation to the proportion that race/ethnicity identity appears in the California population, showed noticeable disparities. Black individuals were stopped 126.46 percent more often than expected and, Hispanic/Latine(x) individuals were stopped 43.76 percent more often than expected, given the population of the state. Conversely, Asian individuals were stopped 52.82 percent less frequently than expected, and multiracial individuals stopped 91.08 percent less frequently than expected. White individuals were stopped 4.38 percent less frequently than expected. 

If you understand what the above says, or better yet, what it means, please share it:

On Page 9, we have this:

C. Reason for Stop In 2023, officers could select one of six primary reasons for initiating a stop. 11 This part of the analysis focuses on the two most common reasons for stops: traffic violations and reasonable suspicion. The remaining four reasons available to officers are examined collectively as “other reasons.” 

The RIPA Data Dictionary (AB953 Technical Data Dictionary) that governs this report, asserts that there are eight Primary Stop Reasons.

Next year there should be 9 or 10.

Lying By Omission

 All that follows is relentlessly grim, Racial Profiling produces grim results.  

In everyday life, Occam's Razor can be used to solve problems and make decisions. It holds that if you have many possible explanations for a problem, the explanation that is most likely to be right is the one that is most straightforward. For example, if you are trying to figure out why your car won't start, you might start by examining the simplest and most obvious explanations, such as a dead battery or a loose wire. Here, in these Racial Profiling matters, we have a repeated dull litany of sameness. From Agency to Agency we see a commonness in stops and outcomes ( Reasons (10), Actions (24) and Results (15).  Blacks are over-stopped and the overstop disparity is matched by the Post-Stop No-Action, None or Warning results, and the obvious futility is unavoidable. The spawn of stops, property seizures and searches are a funtion of and products of the former disproportions.

If you subjected the foregoing (and succeeding) things to Occams's Razor you would conclude that Blacks are perceived as being more suspicious, but the suspicion is quickly set aside by data facts. Data facts that only data dunces can deny or dispute.  The data dunces, are more abundant that you think. Some of them, pedigreed people are fixated on stops alone. Almost invariably, they denigrate population percentage being used a benchmark while remaining blind to the obvious fallacy in, and narrownesss of, their argument.  It seems that the dissonance or incongruity in the finding that persons with the highest culpability for accidents, would have the lowest Citation rate, even higher than the pople who suffer outlandish citation rates, averaging aoun 10% higher than all others; the result of the Asian money-grab. Those "analysts" persist and prosper in spite of lip service from the RIPA Advisory Board. 

Stops are only the beginning.

Two years ago, the 2023 RIPA Annual Report contained this passage:

Black individuals were overrepresented in stops not leading to enforcement

Direct language, language shorn of weasel-words, would have quantified the overrepresentation that I compute to 5.61X, when compared to Whites. The same line could have been written using the same direct direct language as, "Black individuals are being Racially Profiled", since there is no alternative explanation  for such an overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of stops that produce neither Actions nor Results. This 5 times disparity approximates the stop disparity. Indeed, the three LEAs that have attempted explanations have dug themselves deeper holes.

And to illustrate my ongoing concern about impossible people, Catalyst California observed:

C