A California law adds to the data that law enforcement agencies must collect and report after stops. Some of those agencies are using a cloud-based software solution to avoid the resultant paperwork and time burden.
The Racial Identity and Profiling Act (RIPA) requires that officers report detailed perceived demographic information to prevent racial profiling and bias, but providing that data could take five to eight minutes per the report, said Justin Murphy, captain of the Escondido, Calif., Police Department.
“An officer contacts quite a few people in a day, so if you start adding five to eight minutes on every stop, that could potentially add an hour or more to an officer’s day just filling out paperwork that we weren’t doing before,” Murphy said.
Using Veritone Contact, however, it takes officers less than two minutes, he said. The department contracted with the company over the summer and is rolling out the app to all of its 160 officers now to be ready to begin officially collecting the data beginning January 1, 2022, under RIPA’s requirements.
Accessible via a smartphone or the mobile data terminal in a police vehicle, the app asks officers a series of questions about their perceptions of someone’s race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation upon approaching them at a stop. For instance, when an officer pulls someone over and greets them through their vehicle window, that is when the perception starts, Murphy said.
Additional data includes why the officers made the stop, what law covers the reason for the stop, whether a search was conducted, and whether contraband was collected.
Officers hit submit after answering the questions, and their supervisor gets notified of the new report. According to RIPA requirements, after it is reviewed and approved, the data moves to a queue of files that will go to the Justice Department by April 2023.
The idea for Veritone Contact came out of discussions with the Anaheim Police Department, which was looking for a way to comply with RIPA efficiently but also use the data to analyze their practices. To that end, the initial goal was to build flexibility into the application so that individual agencies could create a workflow that best suits their needs.
DOJ offers agencies its own RIPA-compliance app free of charge, and other companies such as ApexMobile are creating apps, while some agencies are building their own. For example, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department “to share and collaborate with the California [law enforcement] community at large.”
Other agencies are incorporating RIPA compliance into existing tools. The city of Berkeley Police Department uses Esri’s Survey123 app, which is available to any locality through current Esri licensing.
A handful of other states, including North Carolina, Illinois, New Jersey and Missouri, have similar laws but are not as far along in implementing them.
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