The Culver City Police Department (CCPD) announced that it will be reporting additional information on arrests and incidents as categorized by race to the California Department of Justice (DOJ). The move comes in accordance with the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) created as a part of 2015’s Assembly Bill 953, and after implementing race distribution data in the department’s monthly reports starting in July.
RIPA, which passed in 2015, requires all police departments to report information to the California Department of Justice on arrests and incidents categorized by “the perceived race or ethnicity, gender, and approximate age of the person stopped, provided that the identification of these characteristics shall be based on the observation and perception of the peace officer making the stop,” (California Government Code 12525.5 (a)(6)). The law also prohibits officers from asking for this information from people when stopped, and applies only to the driver in a motor vehicle unless actions taken by the officer during the stop involves passengers.
Additionally, these reports must also include the specific location and reason for each of these stops. This data will be presented to the California Department of Justice on an annual basis, and will be available for viewing on the Department of Justice’s website at https://oag.ca.gov/
While the law passed in 2015, the CCPD is not required to implement this act until April 1, 2023 (California Government Code 12525.5 (a)(2)) because of the department’s size. At 149 department personnel as documented in the CCPD’s July 2020 monthly report, Culver City Police fell far below the 334 peace officer threshold that would have required RIPA to be enacted at an earlier date. The data will be “collected, retained and reported to the Department of Justice no later than Jan. 1, 2021,” according to a post on the Culver City Police Department’s official Facebook page announcing the change.
Last month, the monthly reports — which are available for public viewing on CCPD’s website — added data for use of force and arrests sorted by race, as well as data on citizen and internal complaints. The reports are available at the end of the month after the report date (e.g. The July 2020 report was released at the end of Aug. 2020). The department has created a section in these reports specifically for RIPA information, which will be implemented in Fall 2020.
For more information on the Culver City Police Department monthly reports, visit their official website at https://www.culvercitypd.org/. To read the full text of AB 953, visit https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/ and visit the bill information tab to search for the full document. You must designate the year as 2015-2016 to find the bill, as the designation of AB 953 has been used for several other bills since RIPA was voted into law.