I\u2019m not a mathematician and I\u2019m not a cop and it\u2019s hard to say which occupation\u2019s skills I\u2019m most lacking.<\/p>\n
I do, however, know my way around town pretty well, and I can usually make a decent stab, give or take a decade, at guessing a person\u2019s age, and I can take a fairly good guess at a person\u2019s ethnicity\u2014all things that are required of cops these days.<\/p>\n
But I will mock-humbly admit that I\u2019m not as much of a genius as the Post\u2019s Dennis Dean and Jeremiah Dobruck and others who have crunched and otherwise disentangled<\/a> the brutally raw and nearly undecipherable numbers that were released by the Long Beach Department a few days ago as required by California\u2019s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, or RIPA. The Post has already reported on some of the more sobering aspects<\/a> of the numbers that resulted from LBPD’s data.<\/p>\n Back when it passed in 2015, RIPA wasn’t a big hit among police officers or their unions. Some groused that it put them in an awkward position, relying on the officers to guess a person’s race or ethnicity. Others\u2014including Long Beach’s police union president at the time\u2014argued that racial profiling doesn\u2019t exist and that filling out all this paperwork\u2014many probably described the paperwork in more sailorly language than I feel comfortable using\u2014is a burden on officers in the field.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not paperwork in the strictest sense. The officers use an iPhone app to enter the information on people they stop, and last year, they stopped 40,524 people.<\/p>\n Of those people, well, and here is where the math\u2014or the officers grappling with their iPhones\u2014gets weird: For instance, 728 people stopped last year were a hybrid of every ethnicity known to police. That was how many people the LBPD described as White, Black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern\/South Asian (and why are those two paired?), Native American and<\/em> Pacific Islander. Seven hundred and twenty-eight of the people stopped\u2014or nearly 2%\u2014were basically described as Alloftheaboevians in terms of ethnicity.<\/p>\n Somewhere between disgruntled police work and an admirable \u201cI don\u2019t see colors\u201d is the truth for the relatively large number of pan-ethnicity found in the department\u2019s reports.<\/p>\n How are cops at guessing age? It\u2019s difficult to say because it\u2019s a matter of each officer\u2019s personal perception, though they could make a better educated guess by checking the individual\u2019s driver\u2019s license or ID. How many people over 100 years of age would you guess were stopped by police last year? If you guessed 57, you\u2019re looking over my shoulder, because that\u2019s suspiciously correct.<\/p>\n One shady character, the police noted, was 120 years old, and if you saw a 120-year-old man driving down Seventh Street, no doubt with his left-turn blinker on for the last 3 miles, you\u2019d pull him over too. That one 120-year-old person, the Dean of Long Beach People Who Need Pulling Over, was the oldest reported potential scofflaw, the other 56 ranged in age, the officers reckoned, between 100 and 105. Throw those guys in juvie. It\u2019ll do \u2018em good.<\/p>\n Finally, one of the hot spots for nabbing potential criminals is the high-crime area of 10th Street and Pacific Coast Highway, an intersection so lawless that nobody with an ounce of decency will venture into it. I have always thought that 10th street never ran into PCH, but, not surprisingly, I’ve been wrong, always. An astute reader points out that there’s a bowling alley-size strip of 10th Street east of Recreation Park Golf Course, that connects Santiago with PCH, barricaded to traffic at the east end of 10th, so, technically, it’s not an intersection, but there is a signpost with Pacific Coast Highway and 10th Street on the corner.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem like a place to be doing anything suspicious enough to be stopped by the police 270 times, as officers have reported. But, who knows? I think I’ve already established the fact that I’m not a cop. And in an earlier version of this story, I made light of the non-fact, as it turns out, that 10th never reaches PCH. So, that’s my bad. And it makes me wonder if there really are 728 people of all ethnicities who were stopped by cops last year.<\/p>\n In broad terms, police said their data is accurate\u2014or at least “accurate in terms of what’s uploaded into the phone,” Assistant Chief Wally Hebeish told the Long Beach Post Monday night. “Obviously there’s margins for error whenever you’re inputting any information.”<\/p>\n In specific terms, we’re waiting for an answer. A spokesperson for the department didn’t get back to me right away about what 10th and PCH means or whether confusing data like that is a simple slip-up by an officer or something else.<\/p>\n Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect the fact that a bit of 10th Street does reach Pacific Coast Highway.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One shady character, the police noted, was 120 years old, and if you saw a 120-year-old man driving down Seventh Street, no doubt with his left-turn blinker on for the last three miles, you\u2019d pull him over too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":1044,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[37,20],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[22],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-2019-ripa-report","tag-tim-grobaty","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}