SFPD officers accused of misreporting racial data
The head of San Francisco’s police oversight body said officials have identified three ways that officers have misreported the races of people they contact through traffic and pedestrian stops — problems that could challenge the integrity of databases used to identify racial disparities in policing.
In some cases, officers have failed to log required data about their stops into a statewide database, Department of Police Accountability Executive Director Paul Henderson said Wednesday evening at a Police Commission meeting. In other cases, he said, officers have mislabeled someone’s race, by, say, listing the person as white when they identify as African American, Henderson said.
Henderson also said there have been instances where officers “enter multiple races for the people being stopped to obscure any obvious or specific racial makeup.”
“Those are some of the issues that we’ve come across,” Henderson said.
Henderson’s remarks came after police commissioners asked about an article by the San Francisco Standard, which reported that a San Francisco police officer was facing discipline after repeatedly misrepresenting the races of people stopped.
According to a May report from the Department of Police Accountability, a review of the officer’s previous 50 stops found that 22 of them listed the wrong race. In 21 out of the 22 cases, officials said, the person involved belonged to a single racial group.
“The evidence revealed a pattern of conduct by the named officer to change the race of persons stopped from a particular race to other races,” officials said in the report.
The investigation into the officer was sparked by a complaint from a citizen, who alleged that the officer stopped and cited him because of his race.
When questioned, the officer “denied stopping the complainant due to his race and stated that he does not perceive race and does not use race to inform his law enforcement decisions,” the report stated.
Further, officials said, a probe of California and police department records “showed that the officer failed to properly identify the complainant’s and his friend’s race in the named officer’s entries in the Stop Data Collection System.”
As part of an effort to root out racial disparities in policing, law-enforcement agencies across California are required to collect demographic data about the people police come into contact with through vehicle or pedestrian stops. A Chronicle review last year of data from the state’s largest agencies found that Black people across the state are far more likely to be stopped than white people.
The review found that in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2020, Black people were nearly six times more likely to be stopped by police than white residents.
San Francisco police commissioners said the issues surrounding the misreporting of race data may warrant an independent audit to determine how widespread they are among the police department.
“As a commission, we rely on that data a lot to make policy decisions,” Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone said in a Chronicle interview Thursday. “We can’t make good policy decisions if the data is compromised.”
The San Francisco Police Department already conducts its own reviews of the stop data entered by officers. At the Police Commission meeting, Assistant Chief David Lazar said the department “definitely need(s) to further that audit to make sure that we’re looking at what’s being entered versus who’s being stopped.”
Carter-Oberstone said he will request police provide reports from the audits they have already conducted, to determine what may be needed from an outside review.
“Ideally,” Carter-Oberstone said, “the department should have caught that itself.”