Stop Data Interpretations Differ
“Lies, damn lies, statistics.” Said Mark Twain in classifying the types of lies. LAPD officers are subject to a brand-new set of rules for making observational stops of pedestrians and vehicles. This new policy entitled “LIMITATION ON THE USE OF PRETEXTUAL STOPS” was unanimously passed by the Police Commission on 3-1-22 and adds section 1/240.06 to the Department Manual.
Since the Consent Decree, LAPD officers have been required to keep individual statistics on stops and the requirement was put into state law in the California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015. There is a lot of raw data out there known as RIPA data.
The Police Commission is convinced that pretextual stops are racist. The Los Angeles Times said so. The IG did an analysis in October of 2020 and examined 672,569 officer-initiated stops made in 2019. 77% of those stops were based on traffic violations, 19% were based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
The racial breakdown that the IG found was that 46 percent were perceived to be Hispanic; 27 percent were perceived to be Black; 18 percent were perceived to be White; 4 percent were perceived to be Asian; 4 percent were perceived to be Middle Eastern or South Asian; 1 percent of records documented multiple races or ethnicities.
Gender wise 74% were male; 26% were female; less than 1% were transgender.
The IG found that Blacks and Hispanics were subjected to more post-stop activity such as searches than other racial groups when viewed as a percentage of their population. The IG does state that they do not know enough about the reasons to know if it is because of racism, but this seemed to be overlooked by the Police Commission. In fact, the report was termed an “indictment” of LAPD by one of the police commissioners.
The large majority of murder victims and victims of violent crimes are minorities. The large majority of described suspects committing the murders and violent crimes are minorities.
LAPD officers might ask themselves that if they are working an area that has a high percentage of minorities and the majority of violent crime reports describe the suspect as a minority and the victim as a minority, wouldn’t an officer trying to stop crime end up investigating and stopping a higher percentage of minorities in their efforts to protect minority victims? Are not minority victims entitled to this? Would it not be racist to ignore these facts?
The obvious question not answered by the IG is what is the effect of high crime areas, racial characteristics of described suspects in crime reports, income levels of the residents, and local racial populations? The IG does not know. But there was another analysis of LAPD stop data available at the time of the IG report.
At the request of the LAPD RIPA board, Dr. Emily Owens of the California Policy Lab conducted a study of the LAPD RIPA data. Dr. Owens is a professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Owens looked at the data and incorporated relevant location data.
The report analyzed 820,254 stops by LAPD officers between July 2018 and October of 2019. However, they were able to determine the location of each of these stops through geocodes. Then they combined this data with demographics at the local level, crime locations and the race of victims and suspects, and station level data of the race of criminal suspects known by the LAPD. This differs from other reports (such as the annual report put out by RIPA Advisory Board) by “analyzing the frequency of, and outcomes associated with, stops that occur across different Los Angeles neighborhoods rather than describing stops at the larger agency level and by factoring in the role of violent crime.” It makes a difference.
In the end, statistics only really count at a very local level. The UC analysis breaks the data down to small areas or stations. Some of the more surprising interpretations are these.
1. “When the racial and ethnic composition of violent crime victims is used as a benchmark for the composition of stops, White people are stopped less often than Black people in 71% of stations, and less often than Latinx people in 52% of stations. However, when suspects, as recorded by the LAPD, are used as a benchmark, White people appear to be stopped more frequently than Black people in all stations, and more frequently than Latinx people in 81% of stations.”
2. “Neighborhood differences in violent crime rates or differences, in the racial composition of crime victims or suspects, do not appear to contribute to disparities in post-stop actions. We find relatively small disparities in use of force (UOF) which occurs in 1.6% of stops for Black people, 1.5% of stops for Latinx people, and 1% of stops for White people.”
3. At the neighborhood level, Black and Latinx people who are stopped are more likely to be searched than White people (in 29.5%, 30%, and 22.8% of stops, respectively, see Figure 21s). Hit rates (rate of contraband found per search) are lower for Black people than for Latinx and White people (23.5%, 26.4% and 26.3% of searches, respectively).”
4. In discretionary searches, the identity group specific hit rates are 18.1%, 19.5% and 18.9% for Black, Latinx, and White people searched, respectively. If one were to create composite LAPD stations that also had equal representation of suspects 9 capolicylab.org RIPA in the LAPD: Summary Report across identity groups, the Black, Latinx and White hit rates in non-discretionary searches would be 22.3%, 20.5% and 23.8%, respectively, and 17.0%, 20.1% and 19.4%, in discretionary searches respectively.”
The point is that depending on the criteria used when you examine data different flavors and opinions are possible. You can read the 3 current reports on stop-data and see how difficult it is to come up with a solution to what is widely perceived to be a problem. The easy answer is stop doing stops. The downside of this is that criminals will feel liberated to carry their guns and dope in public without fear of arrest.
Officers tend to think in a more practical way. Most murders and shootings are connected with gang banging. There goes a car with possible gang members. The registration tag is expired. Let’s stop them and see if there are any guns. And thousands of guns are taken off the street every year.
The major gangs in Los Angeles such as the Crips, Bloods, Mexican Mafia, Eighteenth Street, and most related sub-gangs are made up of minorities. Because gang members are racist in Los Angeles and won’t admit members to their gang outside their ethnicity to their membership, the gangs are largely made up of minorities in the high crime divisions as are their victims. Therefore, the officers will stop more minorities in the course of their discretionary stops when trying to suppress gang crime and trying to protect minority victims. This results in bad optics. Under the new observational stop policy, officers are in more danger of punishment than the suspects.
Before an LAPD officer gets involved in a discretionary stop, consideration must be given to several LAPD policies starting with the limitation on pre-textual stops order. Then make sure that you properly fill out the 30 some questions on the stop-data form, hopefully at the scene. Don’t do it by memory at end-of-watch. There are audits and it must match your Body Worn Video. Then if you are going to do an FI card, be sure to know the new rules on FIs. Finally, if you are going to ask for a consent search, make sure you follow the consent search order and recite the required questions on tape before you do the pat-down. And I thought taking the State Bar exam was hard!
The bottom line is that you must be sure you know and follow all the rules if you decide to make that stop. If you don’t or its borderline, pass it up. Career damage is the result of violating, or having the Department think you are violating, any of the multitude of rules.
It is getting hard to believe that the Police Commission really wants proactive policing. Activists protest and cause problems. Murder victims don’t. Maybe when the government realizes that victim rights are more important than criminal rights things will start to change.
Be legally careful out there.
