50 signatures reached
To: Police Chief Derrick Abell, Mayor Richard Montgomery
Data Transparency in the Manhattan Beach Police Department
Manhattan Beach For Justice started in June, when we filed a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request with the Manhattan Beach Police Department and learned that Black people in Manhattan Beach are 120 times more likely to be arrested than white people in Manhattan Beach, according to the MBPD’s own data. The percentage of Black people arrested in Manhattan Beach is 52 times higher than the percentage of Black Manhattan Beach residents. Likewise, Latinx people are 9 times more likely to be arrested and the percentage of Latinx people arrested is 4 times higher than the percentage of Latinx residents. We asked what it would take to make that data equitable—how many Black people would have to visit Manhattan Beach on average each day to make the population percentage match the arrest rate? We know from the tourism data that Manhattan Beach receives an average of 10,400 visitors per day. For the arrest rate to be equitable, we would have to have 21,025 Black people visit Manhattan Beach on average per day—over twice as many people of all races who visit Manhattan Beach on any given day. This data conclusively proves inequality in policing in Manhattan Beach—even if 100% of our visitors in any given day were Black, the arrest rate would still be inequitable.
This information should be made available to the public on the City's website, and we should be having fact-based conversations about what this data reveals and how to address these disparities.
We learned another concerning thing when we filed our CPRA request: there’s a lot of data the city and the MBPD aren’t keeping track of. We learned that they do not have a racial profiling data collection system—which means that they have no way of knowing whether or not there’s racial profiling going on in their department. We also learned that they don’t keep or track data on encounters with the MBPD, traffic stops by the MBPD, and searches conducted by the MBPD. Nationally, all of these areas of interaction with police disproportionately burden BIPOC, just like arrests do—but we don’t have any transparency or data to examine this in Manhattan Beach.
Likewise, when members of the MB Panel for Equity filed a CPRA request with regard to citations and arrests of minors in the Manhattan Beach Unified School District, they learned that the MBPD does not track disability status, socioeconomic status, English learning status, out-of-district permit status, foster youth / dependency court involvement, or housing stability status for students who have encounters with the MBPD’s School Resource Officers. While it’s not legal to release specific details about citations and arrests for minors, the city and the school district should track raw data and trends, without names attached, so that they can understand which students are most affected and most burdened.
So here’s what we’re asking the MBPD and the City of Manhattan Beach to do:
Publish all data on racial profiling and publish aggregated statistics on arrests broken down by race, gender, and ethnicity.
Implement a racial profiling data collection system in line with the guidelines developed by the Department of Justice to ensure that any racial profiling is tracked and addressed.
Track and publish aggregate data on the race, ethnicity, and gender breakdown of encounters with, traffic stops by, and searches conducted by the MBPD.
Track and publish aggregate data on the disability status, socioeconomic status, English learning status, out-of-district permit status, foster youth / dependency court involvement, or housing stability status with regard to citations and arrests of minors in the MBUSD (without names or information attached).
Why is this important?
There are two problems here: first, the data that we’ve managed to get shows conclusively that there’s inequality in policing in Manhattan Beach, and second, there’s a lot more data that we don’t have. Publishing the data that does exist on the city website is crucial because right now, we’re not having fact-based conversations about policing. We need to start from a shared set of facts, and the data is clear about what those facts are: Black people are 120 times more likely to be arrested. We need to address that.
The second problem is that there’s so much that we don’t know. We know that we can’t take the MBPD’s word for it when they say they’re not racial profiling—that’s already been disproven by the data. So why won’t they keep track of it? Why won’t they make this information publicly available? It’s crucial that we have full transparency, that we hold the MBPD accountable, and that we have serious conversations as a community about how best to promote public safety. We shouldn’t continue to throw more money year after year to a department that is disproportionately targeting BIPOC and that refuses to be transparent or accountable to the public it claims to serve.
If we really want safe communities and strong schools, we need to find new ways to support each other and address root causes of suffering and hardship. Punishment isn’t doing anything to fix the root causes of crime, and we’re seeing that policing is disproportionately targeting and affecting BIPOC people in our community. The first step forward is having a shared basis of facts for these conversations, so that all residents can understand the reality of the MBPD’s practices and outcomes. We need data transparency now.