Century CA, 2024
DATA NOTES
This section contains information on how CPE defines and categorizes the data collected from departments.
DEFINING RACIAL GROUPS AND STANDARD CATEGORIES
Defining racial groups:
CPE uses “racial group” to refer to groups described in departmental records by racial category (e.g., Hispanic or Latino, Asian, Black, Native, White). When we compare departmental records of incidents to local demographic data, these racial groups are mapped onto Census data for the following groups: Hispanic (referred to as “Latinx” in this assessment), non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Native American, and non-Hispanic White. The “Other” category, if used, combines racial groups making up less than 2% of incidents (except when referring to the resident population, in which case it matches the Census Bureau’s definition of “Other” racial group).
Our use of “racial” as a shorthand for these groups does not represent a claim that any person belongs to any monolithic “race,” or indeed that the category of “race” has any objective or biological meaning, apart from its social and political context. We acknowledge the historic and deliberate use of racial categories in crime statistics to link criminality to Black people, a bias that continues to affect marginalized communities and people in the criminal justice system today. We also recognize that the terms we use to describe racial groups are not universally accepted or preferred by members of the groups they describe. We aim to use terms which are inclusive, widely understood, and unlikely to offend.
Standardizing categories:
Each law enforcement agency collects stop, search, use of force, and racial data in its own way. In order to interpret data consistently across departments, we sort the data received from departments into standardized categories. The following tables show the categories used by the department and how we translate them into CPE categories. The “LEA-Provided Value” column contains the categories that the department provided to CPE, and the “CPE Standardized” column shows the corresponding category CPE used in this assessment.
Stop data collected under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) do not separate vehicle stops from pedestrian stops; however, they do indicate whether a stop was initiated due to a traffic violation. Therefore, when using data collected under RIPA, we categorize any stops for which the recorded reason is “traffic violation” as “vehicle stops,” and all other stops are categorized as “pedestrian stops.” However, we acknowledge that some reasons categorized under pedestrian stops in this assessment could also apply to vehicle stops (such as “reasonable suspicion” or “knowledge of outstanding arrest/wanted person”). See the tables below for more information on the stop reasons sorted into each dataset.
For more information about why certain results were not displayed, a detailed list of data requirements for each analysis is available under “More information,” beneath the relevant chart.
