Attorney General Becerra Announces Revised Proposed Regulations to Collect Data Required During Law Enforcement Stops

Today Marks Beginning of 15-Day Comment Period Before Final Regulations Are Issued

SACRAMENTO – California Attorney General Xavier Becerra today posted revised proposed regulations for the collection of data that law enforcement agencies must report to the California Department of Justice (DOJ) under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA). The revised regulations released today reflect input received from a diverse group of stakeholders on the original version of the proposed regulations posted by DOJ in December 2016. The revised regulations further refine the data and reporting requirements to streamline the data collection process for law enforcement while balancing the need to collect data that will enable authorities to analyze the information in a meaningful way.

“Racial and identity profiling are not acceptable policing practices and do not increase public trust between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to protect,” said Attorney General Becerra. “The revised regulations we posted today are vital to ensuring public safety and reflect critical input from law enforcement, community members and scholars. I am proud that California continues to lead the country in addressing racial and identity profiling."

Today’s announcement begins a 15-day public comment period, which will conclude on August 16, 2017. Members of the public are invited to view the proposed regulations and submit public comments by visiting oag.ca.gov/ab953/regulations.

Some of the notable revisions to the original regulations include:

• Streamlined data elements and values to conform with comments from law enforcement, academics, advocacy groups and all stakeholders who participated in the public comment period;
• Simplified reporting requirements to exclude specific circumstances in which reporting would pose a risk to public safety, prove impractical for law enforcement, or skew the data in a manner that would undermine the intent of the law;
• Added short explanatory fields for officers to provide more detail for the Reason for the Stop, and when applicable, the Basis for Searching a Person or Property; and
• Further clarified protections to ensure that individual officers and persons stopped are not identified through this data collection.

In December 2016, the DOJ published the original stop data regulations, as required by AB 953, to specify the data that local and certain state law enforcement agencies will be required to collect and report to the DOJ on each stop by a law enforcement officer. After receiving substantial input from stakeholders and after conducting a field test to better understand the practical implications of this data collection, the DOJ has revised these regulations.

Stakeholders that provided input include the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory (RIPA) Board; state and local law enforcement agencies and associations; civil rights groups; individuals representing the LGBTQ, immigrant, disability and youth rights communities; community organizations; and members of academia.