Police Data

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 ...

 Last year the Los Altos City Council approved the installation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from a company called Flock Safety. While the efficacy of ALPRs as a crime-fighting tool has proven very difficult to see (for example,  this  and this show little statistical evidence for improvement), a new problem has come to light: It seems that Flock tends to be pretty casual about the rules. Two articles came out recently that call Flock's carefulness into question.  First, a Forbes article  (more reporting here ) found that Flock frequently put up cameras without regard to permitting or traffic safety considerations. "[I]n its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states. In two, state agencies have banned Flock staff from installing new cameras," Forbes correspondents Thomas Brewster and Cyrus Farivar report. Apparently, in the Silicon Valley tradition of ...

One afternoon on a remote work day, you are sitting at home, looking out the window before getting back to work on that TPS report that's due Monday. Outside, you see someone walking slowly down the street -- someone you don't recognize. "Who is that guy? What's he doing here?" you think to yourself. And maybe, "He seems suspicious. I think I'm going to call the police." It's important that we all work together to keep our communities safe. But sometimes, our natural tendencies can end up making our communities hostile and unsafe for innocent people.  "Bias by proxy" is an effect that can happen if the police get called for "suspicious people," and those calls are biased by race. If a Black man walking down the street is perceived as suspicious, and someone calls the cops to check up on him, then innocent Black people are going to get stopped and questioned by the police. Even if the police aren't biased, there will be bia...

 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...

Another LAPD, perhaps slightly more famous than ours, has the motto, “To Protect and To Serve.” It is a sentiment I think we can all get behind – we want safe communities, and we would like the police department to help us achieve that. We seem to end up in a lot of confusion and disagreement, though, when we look at how to actually make that happen. I once had a mentor who would always, always ask: “What is your goal?” He would push me to think hard about what I wanted, what the desired outcome was, before getting down into the weeds of the implementation. Without knowing what we are trying to accomplish, it’s unlikely that we can come up with a very good solution. Being clear about goals helps our discussion in another way: we choose goals based on our preferences, desires, visions, and hopes. We (ought to) choose implementations based on empirical data. That is, once we’ve decided what we want, the question of how to get that becomes one of facts, not of opinions. Too often we get i...