Dear Mayor Taylor and Council Members, Thank you very much for preserving the Open Data Portal for the police department. This is an important tool to provide residents with transparency. While the data from the Open Data Portal reported in a recent letter to Council showing disparities in citations by race, this is data that the city has, which can be used as a start to explore the underlying issues. At last night's teleforum with the Mayor and Chief Bertini, a woman called in and commented on the experiences where she and her neighbors need to respond to their teenage children about being stopped by police for no apparent reason. These stops do not result in citation or arrest, so they are not currently recorded in the city's database. My guess is that if such stops were recorded, they would show disparities by location and race, as there are common patterns across the US showing racial disparities in police stops. Where such disparities exist, they can contribute to worse relationships between community members and police, making legitimate law enforcement more difficult, to psychological burden for people subject to more frequent stops, and to increased likelihood of disparate enforcement of issues that do not differ by race, and increased risk of escalation. In order to better understand police interactions with the community, it would be valuable to also track stops by race and by neighborhood. Thank you for your consideration. - Adina Adina Levin Menlo Park Resident Received on Fri Jun 05 2020 - 11:46:14 PDT
