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What's going on in Sunnyvale?

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The big news on local TV today is the "59% rise in violent crime" in Sunnyvale. That caught my attention, because a) it sounds like another bogus use of statistics and b) as we've seen in Los Altos next door, crime has been generally low and not shooting up. The news report alluded to "California DOJ" data, but failed to actually point to it. Have no fear, gentle reader, for we have trod where KTVU fears to go: straight to the data. The DOJ does, in fact, provide this data, although it takes a little work to get to. You can download it here, if you are interested: https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics   Next you have to filter that down to only show Sunnyvale. Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice all have a way of doing that, using "filters." Once you set them up, you get a little pull-down menu for each column, and you can select only the values you want. That's what I did, for each of the 5 cities shown below. Then I plott...
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ALPR data being shared with anti-abortion states

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Despite guidance from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, quite a few California police departments are sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies. ALPR systems, like the one that Los Altos is installing from Flock Safety, take pictures of every car going by, digitize their license plate, and record their presence. Police say this helps identify stolen vehicles, which are often used in crimes -- in principle, this should reduce crime, although the evidence that it actually works is very thin. This is a problem if someone from an abortion-restricted state travels to California for reproductive health care. By law , (AB 1242) police in California cannot assist out-of-state law enforcement in prosecuting people for coming here for an abortion. And by law (SB 34) California police cannot share any ALPR data with out-of-state agencies, according to our AG.  And  yet 71 police agencies did just that, and dozens still do. Many ...
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RIPA Update for Los Altos

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 The helpful folks at the city recently provided me with the RIPA data through August, so it's a good time to check in on the State of Los Altos Policing for the first half of the year. It's been a fairly quiet summer on the police policy front, with a few high-visibility arrests using ALPRs, and discussion going on about purchasing drones for the police. Here's what we are seeing on the data front -- after all, this is a data blog! RIPA Stops As you all know by now, every police department in California is required to collect data on every single stop that they make. This data, suitably anonymized, is then public. You can get this by submitting a public records request to the City; I've also put it in the github repo, along with all the analysis code, if you'd like to look at it yourself. Here are the stops per month since Los Altos started collecting RIPA data. As you can see, the vast majority of stops are for traffic violations. There are lots of ways you might ...
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