Time to put best practices to use

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 In addition to collecting and analyzing data from all police stops in California, the RIPA Board and the Department of Justice make an annual series of recommendations and best practices for policing.

These recommendations have input from lots of different stakeholders: police officers, leaders of NGOs, DoJ lawyers, civil rights lawyers, state analysts, academic analysts, pastors and community members. The membership is really impressive.

So the recommendations they come up with have a lot going for them. They are rooted in empirical data. They have input from experts, from officers with real-world experience, and from historically marginalized communities. We really should take them seriously.

The recommendations are also very specific, and because of that, the documents are pretty long. Here's a high-level summary of some of the things recommended in past years; click through the links to see the full set of recommendations.

2021

  • Law enforcement agencies should proactively take measures to limit implicit and explicit bias, and train officers to recognize bias in the workplace.
  • Law enforcement should adopt a comprehensive system of accountability, leaning towards as much transparency as possible
  • Law enforcement should construct systems that limit "bias-by-proxy" -- the effect when the calls that come into the police department reflect bias from the callers, which then generates police bias.

2022

  • Law enforcement agencies should take proactive steps to counter bias against transgender people; many specific steps are suggested.
  • Law enforcement agencies should take proactive steps to empathetically handle interactions with disabled people. Again many specific steps are suggested, especially for handling mental health crises.
  • Agencies should severely limit "consent searches." By law, unless they have probable cause, officers must ask your consent before searching. But the Board's research shows that people can very rarely give free consent in situations where they are being questioned by uniformed officers.
  • The Legislature should put in place some common requirements for civilian complaints, to ensure that complaints are heard and that civilians are protected from retaliation

2023

  • Agencies and municipalities should eliminate "pretext stops." This is when an officer has a suspicion about a person, so they pull them over for some other reason. For example, they may suspect the person is looking for a house to rob, and so pull them over for an expired license plate. Pretext stops are a gateway to bias.
  • Agencies should provide youth with additional protections, since age differences compound the power imbalance when youth interact with police.
  • And apparently a bit annoyed that so few departments have taken up the best practices, they reiterate many of their recommendations from previous years.
All of these recommendations are backed up with a huge amount of analysis performed by the California Department of Justice. The full 2023 report is 222 pages long -- and that doesn't even include the appendix where the nerdy data analysis happens!

So what?

A lot of high-quality work has gone into these RIPA reports, and a lot of effort has been made to make sure that all the stakeholders are represented. We are crazy to ignore it and try to solve problems on our own, when so much of the work has already been done.

There are recommendations in each year's report for police departments, for local City Councils, for the state level Police Officer Standards and Training board, and for the State legislature. Many of the recommendations are things that don't really make sense for Los Altos to pursue on a local level.

All of the full reports, summaries, appendices, and lists of best practices can be found on the Department of Justice website here.

But at the very least, we should have City staff study these recommendations annually. The Police Department should adopt all of the local recommendations, or demonstrate to City Council that there are specific good reasons why a particular practice would not work will in Los Altos.

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