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Daryl Savage’s effort to save the police department time — by cutting the amount of demographic information, such as race, officers collect — was strongly opposed by her Human Relations Commission colleagues Thursday evening.
But by the end of the evening, the commission agreed to pursue a compromise crafted by Councilwoman LaDoris Cordell, the council’s liaison to the commission.
Rather than collect the race, sex, age, city of residence and other information from people stopped by the police for one three-month chunk per year, as proposed by Vice Chair Savage, the department could collect the data continuously, but only analyze a random sampling of dates, Cordell suggested. That would eliminate the possibility that officers would know when their contacts with the public would be recorded.
“She improved on a good idea,” Savage said Friday.
Savage said she proposed the cutback because the data hasn’t changed much since it was first collected in 2000, it takes a considerable amount of department time to compile and the city now has access to a police auditor and video cameras in patrol cars.
“On an experimental basis, we just want to give it a try,” Savage said.
Savage said she was not asked by the Police Department to make the proposal, although officers were receptive to the idea when she shared it.
It takes an officer about five minutes to enter the information, which also includes the location of the stop and its resolution. Until this year, the officers wrote the information down on cards; now they enter it into a computer, Contois said.
But for administrative staff, the compilation takes about 800 hours a year, according to the department’s Director of Technical Services Sheryl Contois.
The Police Department has collected demographic data from each officer-initiated contact with the public since 2000, which is then compiled into quarterly reports released twice a year, Contois said.
The reports display the data in a variety of formats — such as the percentage of African Americans stopped at night for vehicle equipment failures. But they aren’t used by the department or the public, Police Chief Lynne Johnson said Thursday.
The data is not used when a complaint of racial profiling is made, Johnson said.
“Quite honestly, I don’t think anybody else in the community reads it except for Mr. Abraham,” Johnson said, referring to John Abraham, a longtime department critic.
“I think if you don’t see the data as a tool that can make your department more effective and efficient then that’s a concern,” Commissioner Donald Mendoza said. He said the real issue was how to analyze the data so it would be useful to the community.
“There may be a message in that data that may be of importance,” he said.
Palo Alto Police Auditor Michael Gennaco, an attorney with the Los Angeles Office of Independent Review, said that many cities are struggling with the question of what to do with the demographic data they have collected.
“Quite frankly, as I sit here today I think of all the work that’s been done … has probably frustrated more folks that have had to deal with this than they have resolved much of anything,” Gennaco said.
But, Gennaco pointed out, just collecting the data “could be seen at least as an attempt to provide some level of transparency.”
And cutting back on the collection of racial information would send a bad message to the community, commissioners Jeff Blum and Olana Hirsch Khan said.
Collecting data only “a quarter a year would hinder a lot of the transparency and communication in our community,” Khan said, opposing Savage’s original idea.
“What are we telling, in particular, the minorities?,” Blum questioned.
Chair Adam Atito said he would like the department to make improvements based on problems discovered in the data.
Only three vocal department critics attended Thursday’s meeting.
Savage said she plans to work with Atito and Commissioner Shauna Wilson, who comprise the commission’s Police/Community Relations subcommittee, to develop a workable proposal to compile only a random sampling of the data as suggested by Cordell.
The commission could then turn to Stanford experts or others to help them figure out how to transform the data into a meaningful form, Cordell said.
> But for administrative staff, the compilation takes about 800 hours
> a year, according to the department’s Director of Technical
> Services Sheryl Contois.
> It takes an officer about five minutes to enter the information,
> which also includes the location of the stop and its resolution.
> Until this year, the officers wrote the information down on cards;
? now they enter it into a computer, Contois said.
There are about 10,000 traffic stops a year, so at five minutes a stop the total time required to enter this data is about 833 hours. Presumably this is the same 800 hours that the Police Technical Services Director is talking about, but that is not clear.
What is sad is that with a computer in the patrol car, the time-of-day, GPS coordinates of the location where the stop was executed can be provided to a program that collects this sort of data. If the Officer were to enter M or F for sex, a 1-3 character code for stop type and stop resolution, and the Zipcode of the detained person’s address, it would seem that it would take only a few seconds to get this information entered. As long as the cards are not needed as a check-and-balance against fraudulent/erroneous entries by the officer, then this process could be reduced to a few seconds.
The officer would upload the data file at some point, and GPS coordinates and city/state would be looked up from a Zipcode lookup table on a server computer. The now completed file would be forwarded to the person who compiles this information. Any/all reports should be compiled either from Excel spreadsheet processing, or some simple program written for purposes of report formatting.
Here we are in the middle of Silicon Valley and it seems that no one in the Police Department remotely understands what is possible with a computer.
I was so happy, years ago, when race was outlawed as a government statistic. With electronics it would be possible to make an absolute racial ID during a traffic stop. So much for equal justice under the law.
I believe the 800 hours of time is what the staff puts in to record all that data. It’s an additional 800+ for the cops to plug in their data.
> I believe the 800 hours of time is what the
> staff puts in to record all that data. It’s an
> additional 800+ for the cops to plug in their data.
Well .. the cops are being paid to be on the street for a complete shift, so what else are they going to do with their time? Once they finish the “paper work” for a stop they just drive around looking for someone else to stop, or stay where they are waiting for someone to come along. They are being paid to be out on the street, so if they spend a few extra minutes per stop with paperwork, what’s the problem.
As to the 800 hours to process this data once it’s collected, that turns out to be 20 man-weeks or about 40% of an FTE! Something is very wrong with this process if the Technology Director can’t figure out how to get this really innocuous data on and off a laptop computer and correlated into a meaning report in less than 800 hours.
However, if both 800 hour numbers are true, this report is costing us 1600 man hours, or almost all of an FTE. That means the tax payers are paying about $80K for this information.
And people wonder about “waste” at City Hall.
When you see a police cruiser tucked away in the corner of some parking lot, they are entering all the data into their computers. I’d prefer to see them out cruising our streets.
> When you see a police cruiser tucked away in the corner
> of some parking lot, they are entering all the data into
> their computers. I’d prefer to see them out cruising
> our streets.
Perhaps .. but the few extra minutes they spend entering data (it might be interesting to have the police department tell us how much time they do spend) isn’t going to result in any demonstrable traffic safety.
Over time it’s likely to see that the citation will be generated from information stored on the driver’s license and electronics in the patrol car. Other than comments relevant to the stop, most of the information could be obtained from electronics in the cruiser (such as the highest speed of the car being stopped, direction of the travel, date, time, officer’s name, badge number, etc. Access to a GPS/GIS system would provide the location of the stop, as well as the posted speed limit for that stretch of road.
It’s a little odd that the data for this “local monitoring” can’t be taken off the citation itself.
“However, if both 800 hour numbers are true, this report is costing us 1600 man hours, or almost all of an FTE. That means the tax payers are paying about $80K for this information.”
Is this true? $80K of our taxes for information that nobody looks at? That’s obscene!
This is pretty sad.
Not what is being written, but shouldn’t this information be linked to our driving licence numbers. I mean, if they have the color of my hair and the color of my eyes, what is wrong with the color of my skin. After all, if someone needs to give a description of me for some reason, wouldn’t the color of my hair (which could be changed) and the color of my eyes, who would notice (and that can be changed with contact lenses), plus my weight (which of course is harder to describe) be down on the list of things someone may use to describe me. The first description would be the color of my skin. It makes sense to put skin color on licences if the rest of my description is on the licence. Then, most of this information would not need to be entered into a computer as it would already be there in a hypothetical situation such as that of a traffic stop!!