2022 RIPA Report Analysis and One-Pager

In January 2023, PORAC released a critical analysis by Texas State University Professor of Criminal Justice Dr. Brian L. Withrow of the California Department of Justice’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory (RIPA) Board’s 2022 Annual Report. It found that the Board’s methodology in analyzing police stop data from 2020 as contained in the 2022 Annual Report was seriously flawed, failing to achieve the professional statistical rigor that is necessary to draw meaningful conclusions that California’s policy and decision makers can reasonably rely on. The conclusions therefore misrepresent the state of racial profiling in California. PORAC released this analysis to bring to light the significant statistical inaccuracies in how stop data was quantified, urging the Board to review their methodology and revise their reporting criteria before misleading the public again.