RIPA Update for Los Altos
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 ...