Police Department Stop Data

<strong>UPDATE 1/7/2025: On June 28th 2023, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) changed its Stops Data Collection System (SDCS). As a result of this change, record identifiers have changed from the Department of Justice (DOJ) identifier to an internal record numbering system (referred to as "LEA Record ID"). The data that SFPD uploads to the DOJ system will contain the internal record number which can be used for joins with the data available on DataSF.</strong>

<strong>A. SUMMARY</strong>
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD)  Stop Data was designed to capture information to comply with the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), or <u><a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB953"> California Assembly Bill (AB)953</a></u>. SFPD officers collect specific information on each stop, including elements of the stop, circumstances and the perceived identity characteristics of the individual(s) stopped. The information obtained by officers is reported to the California Department of Justice. This dataset includes data on stops starting on July 1st, 2018, which is when the data collection program went into effect. <u><a href="https://sfdigitalservices.gitbook.io/dataset-explainers/police-department-stop-data">Read the detailed overview for this dataset here.</a></u>

<strong>B. HOW THE DATASET IS CREATED</strong>
By the end of each shift, officers enter all stop data into the Stop Data Collection System, which is automatically submitted to the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ). Once a quarter the Department receives a stops data file from CA DOJ. The SFPD conducts several transformations of this data to ensure privacy, accuracy and compliance with State law and regulation. For increased usability, text descriptions have also been added for several data fields which include numeric codes (including traffic, suspicion, citation, and custodial arrest offense codes, and actions taken as a result of a stop). See the data dictionaries below for explanations of all coded data fields. <u><a href="https://sfdigitalservices.gitbook.io/dataset-explainers/police-department-stop-data">Read more about the data collection, and transformation, including geocoding and PII cleaning processes, in the detailed overview of this dataset.</a></u>

<strong>C. UPDATE PROCESS</strong>
Information is updated on a quarterly basis. 

<strong>D. HOW TO USE THIS DATASET</strong>
This dataset includes information about police stops that occurred, including some details about the person(s) stopped, and what happened during the stop. Each row is a person stopped with a record identifier for the stop and a unique identifier for the person. A single stop may involve multiple people and may produce more than one associated unique identifier for the same record identifier. A certain percentage of stops have stop information that can’t be geocoded. This may be due to errors in data input at the officer level (typos in entry or providing an address that doesn't exist). More often, this is due to officers providing a level of detail that isn't codable to a geographic coordinate - most often at the Airport (ie: Terminal 3, door 22.) In these cases, the location of the stops is coded as unknown.

<strong>E. DATA DICTIONARIES</strong>
<u><a href="https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/sdcs-look-up-table-2023.v2.xlsx"> CJIS Offense Codes data look up table</a></u>

<u><a href="https://datasfstaging.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/public/pol_stops_data_dict.csv"> Look up table for other coded data fields</a></u>

Tags: ab953, police-department, ripa, sfpd, stops
Organization: City of San Francisco