Garbage in, Racial Equity out? Assessing the Utility of Racial & Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) Data for Evaluating Policing Interventions

Background and Purpose: Racial disparities in policing are well-established. California’s Racial & Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) requires municipal law enforcement agencies to document police stops in an effort to monitor and address such disparities in policing. However, RIPA data, and law enforcement administrative data more broadly, are novel and have been understudied as a data source for monitoring or evaluating the effects of interventions on policing behavior and civilian outcomes. Like other sources of administrative data, RIPA data may suffer from low-quality data reporting or even misreporting, decreasing its utility for tracking and testing attempts to diminish racial profiling in policing (i.e., garbage in, garbage out). To strengthen knowledge on the utility of police monitoring data, this exploratory study examined the validity and reliability of RIPA stop data for youth and adults reported by municipal law enforcement agencies in one diverse California county.

Methods: We replicated and expanded upon the racial and identity disparity analyses in the 2025 annual RIPA board report to assess whether statewide disparities were also observed across 18 municipal agencies in the large county, with a focus on stop disparities by the perceived race and mental health status of stopped youth. We assessed the reliability of the data by conducting match analyses between RIPA youth stop data and juvenile court records, as well as between adult RIPA data and booking records from the county sheriff.

Results: Youth stop disparities in the county aligned with those in the statewide RIPA report, with youth perceived to be Black and Hispanic as well as youth perceived to have mental health challenges being at increased risk for use of force and other adverse outcomes. Match rates between adult RIPA data and sheriff booking data depended on the combinations of variables used to match cases (e.g., date and city (95%), date, city and age (15%), date, city and sex (90%), and date, city and race (79%) ). Match rates between youth RIPA data and juvenile court records were low regardless of the variables used.

Conclusions and Implications: Although there are limitations of the RIPA dataset, these findings elucidate the potential for RIPA and similar law enforcement administrative datasets to be used in evaluating policing interventions. Our approach can serve as a useful model for future researchers, law enforcement agencies, and public officials seeking to assess the quality of law enforcement data or to use it as an evaluative tool.