Jan. 28, 2022 - As of Jan. 1, 2022, the CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) Police Department have officially begun collecting specific data for every individual traffic stop, detention, or search.
This move is in accordance with Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015, which requires California police officers to collect, and report perceived demographic data on all stops. The process has been rolling out steadily since then to law enforcement agencies starting first with larger departments.
Whenever a CSUCI officer stops someone in a vehicle or on foot, the officer will fill out a questionnaire that covers 40 data points aimed at determining any perceptions the officer has about the person stopped, plus a 250-word explanation of why that person was stopped.
Besides data such as the date, time, location and length of the stop, the questions will cover aspects of the individual that the officer perceives such as race or ethnicity, gender, age, disability, or fluency in English.
The officer’s stop data will then be entered into a mobile data computer that has been installed in each of the officer’s vehicles. All stop data is sent to the California Department of Justice and reviewed annually by a 19-member RIPA board which consists of community advocates, spiritual leaders, academics, attorneys, and law enforcement.
“I’m all for being transparent to the public and I don’t believe our officers are racially profiling, but if somebody feels that is going on, they now have a mechanism to report that,” CSUCI Interim Chief Drake Massey said. “I intend to help beef that up even further by not only sending the data to the DOJ, but by putting it up on the University Police Department (UPD)’s public-facing website.”