October 20, 2008Los Angeles Board of Police CommissionersAnthony Pacheco, PresidentJohn Mack, Vice PresidentAndrea OrdinRobert SaltzmanAlan Skobin150 N. Los Angeles StreetLos Angeles, CA 90012Dear Commissioners:I write to provide you the attached copy of 

 A Study of Racially DisparateOutcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department 

, a report prepared for the ACLUof Southern California by Prof. Ian Ayres (hereinafter the “Ayres Report”). Prof.Ayres is an economist appointed jointly at Yale School of Management and as theWilliam K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School. After conducting a varietyof analyses, Prof. Ayres concluded that “[t]he results of this study raise graveconcerns that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked,over-searched, and over-arrested.” (Ayres Report at 27.)The ACLU of Southern California has long been concerned about racial profiling and race-based disparities in policing. Prof. Ayres’s report ends debateabout the existence of the problem and validates the experience in communities of color of police interactions attributable to “driving while black” or “driving while brown.” But the ACLU recognizes that the LAPD has recently taken steps toimprove training on and investigations of bias-based policing. While more isneeded, Prof. Ayres’ report demonstrates the need to complete the task and toadopt training, policies, and systems of analysis that could make LAPD a model inthis area.

Background

As you are well aware, the Department has collected data pursuant to thefederal consent decree for seven years, but has produced only one substantiveanalysis of that data — the report on post-stop outcomes by the Analysis Group,

 

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 A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department 

,(Analysis Group 2006), available at http://www.lapdonline.org/home/pdf_view/32911.released in 2006.

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That report was largely inconclusive. The Analysis Group described itsresults by saying, “Although some divisions/bureaus have statistically significant racialdisparities for some outcomes and some races, when evaluated across all outcomes, there is noconsistent pattern of race effects across divisions or races.” (Analysis Group at 4.) The report’sauthors ultimately concluded that they could not “draw definitive conclusions about the existenceor non-existence of racial profiling by the LAPD.” (Analysis Group at 5.)Following the issuance of the Analysis Group’s report, the ACLU of Southern Californiarequested the data on which the report was based under the Public Records Act. We ultimatelyobtained the very same data files used by the Analysis Group in preparing their report, and provided them to Prof. Ayres, who replicated the Analysis Group’s study, examined it for methodological flaws, and conducted additional analyses that would be probative of racially biased policing.

Revisions to the Analysis Group’s Methodology of Post-Stop Analysis

Although Prof. Ayres’ report examines the same data as the Analysis Group, it goes beyond the scope of that report in its analysis, in several respects. First, while the Analysis Groupcalculated racial disparities for each of the Department’s 18 geographic divisions separately, itnever calculated the disparities across the entire Department. As Prof. Ayres points out, thisapproach not only avoids the core question of whether the LAPD, on the whole, exhibits racialdisparities in its treatment of Angelenos, but it also artificially reduces the sample size, lesseningthe likelihood that disparities would show statistical significance.Second, the Analysis Group controlled for officer characteristics such as years on theforce or number of commendations or complaints — in other words, concluding that if racialdisparities correlated with a record of officer complaints, that the problem was due to officerswith complaints, not due to “racial profiling.” As Prof. Ayres explains, controlling for suchvariables is inappropriate. Racial disparities are no more justifiable because they come fromrookies as opposed to veteran officers, or officers with who have received more complaints rather than those with pristine records. Prof. Ayres’ report eliminates the inappropriate consideration of officer characteristics from its analyses.Making these adjustments, Prof. Ayres shows substantial racial disparities in post-stopaction. Accounting for all the variables the Analysis Group included, with the exception of officers characteristics, Prof. Ayres found that city-wide:• Stopped African Americans were 29% more likely than stopped whites to bearrested, and stopped Hispanics were 32% more likely than stopped whites to bearrested. When limited to more discretionary arrests, stopped African Americans

 

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Because LAPD’s system of data collection uses the racial category “Hispanic,” I use thatterm when discussing the data.remained 13% more likely to be arrested and stopped Hispanics

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were 21.4%more likely to be arrested than stopped whites.• Stopped African Americans were 166% more likely and Hispanics were 132%more likely to be asked to exit vehicles than stopped whites.• Stopped African Americans were 127% more likely and Hispanics were 43%more likely to be frisked or patted down than stopped whites.• Stopped African Americans were 76% more likely and stopped Hispanics weremore than 16% more likely than stopped whites to be asked to submit to aconsensual search.These results were all statistically significant to greater than 99% confidence, except for high-discretion arrests of African Americans, which was statistically significant to greater than 95%confidence.

Stop Rate Disparities

The Analysis Group did not examine the disparities in the rates at which people of color are stopped by police in the first place. This approach leaves a crucial element of racial profilingout of the picture, as stops themselves can be a form of harassment, apart from any frisks or searches that are conducted. This omission can lead to misleading results — for example,although African Americans, once stopped, are given citations at a lower rate than whites,African Americans are stopped at such dramatically higher rates that the overall citation rate of African American residents is still substantially higher than that of whites.Performing the stop-rate analyses that the Analysis Group omitted, Prof. Ayres found thatAfrican Americans were much more likely to be stopped than non-minorities. In the single year of data, there were more than 4,500 stops for every 10,000 African Americans residents but only1,750 stops for every 10,000 residents classified as white or “other.” This marked racial disparityin the likelihood of being stopped is not merely an artifact of different area crime rates — inregressions controlling for both violent and property crime rates, statistically significantdisparities in stop rates persisted for both African Americans and Hispanics. Nor do thedisparities result from assigning more police to neighborhoods with higher concentrations of African Americans or Hispanics. Indeed, the racial disparity in stop rates was higher inneighborhoods with a lower percentage of people of color than in neighborhoods that were predominantly African American or Hispanic. Prof. Ayres concludes, “These stark statisticsfrom a single year of LAPD motor vehicle and pedestrian stops give a numeric lens for the livedexperience of ‘driving while black’ or ‘driving while Hispanic.’” (Ayres Report at 27.)