Cotati City Council
Agenda Staff Report
Item type: REGULAR AGENDA (ACTION)
To: Cotati City Council
Subject: ANNUAL POLICE CHIEF REPORT TO THE COMMUNITY
Date: February 24, 2026
Written by: Chris Simmons, Chief of Police
Recommendation
It is recommended that the City Council receive and discuss the annual Police Chief report for the calendar year 2025.
Background
In 2021, the Chief of Police presented the first annual report to the City Council and the community, which covered activities and statistics from the previous calendar year (2020). Since then, there have been a total of five annual reports presented (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).
These reports are posted publicly on the City of Cotati website for ease in accessibility so that the community may better understand the undertakings the police department is involved in and the ways in which we continue to make our city safe.
This current presentation marks the sixth annual report and is presented for the 2025 calendar year. As with the previous reports, the 2025 annual report is a tool for open discussions and will be posted on the website for greater accessibility and transparency.
Analysis/Discussion
The annual report consists of numerous data elements related to police and South County SAFE (Specialized Assistance For Everyone) calls for service, arrests, NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System) crime statistics, traffic citations, citizen complaints, and uses of force.
As has been the case in previous years, a large portion of this year’s annual report is dedicated to RIPA (Racial Identity Profiling Act) data and Cotati Police Department’s pledge to ensure equitable service delivery and treatment of our citizens and visitors. RIPA was formed as part of AB953 (Weber, 2016).
The California Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of the Attorney General, developed a RIPA Board to analyze a “stop data” collection process. On July 1, 2018, the eight largest police agencies in California began collecting stop data and reporting the information to the DOJ.
A “RIPA stop” is defined as any detention or search, with the goal to “collect perceived demographic and other detailed data regarding pedestrian and traffic stops.” The bill required an agency that employs between one and 334 peace officers to issue its first annual report to DOJ by April 1, 2023. (All police agencies in Sonoma County, including the Cotati Police Department, are in this category).
For transparency, the Cotati Police Department decided to collect RIPA data before the scheduled mandate. Our Police Department is a member of a Public Safety consortium. Members of the consortium include the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, cities of Cotati, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, and Windsor (Sonoma and Windsor contract services with Sheriff’s Department).
Collectively, the consortium agencies started collecting RIPA data using patrol car mobile computers and smart phones on July 1, 2021. The data is collected by the consortium and transmitted to the DOJ daily for review and quality control. This data set then becomes the single “point of truth” for validated data statewide.
The RIPA Board released its most recent annual report on January 1, 2026. The 2026 report contains an analysis of more than 5.1 million police stops conducted in 2024 under RIPA (The RIPA report is always a year behind in data reporting). The full report is available at https://oag.ca.gov/ab953/board/reports.
Per the Board’s report, the stop data for perceived ethnicity for the state of California in 2024 was similar to that of 2022 and 2023:
2022 2023 2024
White 32.5% 31.96% 31.28%
Hispanic/Latine(x) 42.9% 43.07% 43.31%
Black 12.5% 12.14% 12.09%
Asian 5.5% 5.72% 5.87%
Note that Middle Eastern/South Asian (5.43%), Multiracial (1.23%), and Pacific Islander (0.53%), Native American (0.26%) were also reported in 2025. These numbers are also similar to previous years.
Comparatively, the stop data for perceived ethnicity for the Cotati Police Department for 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were as follows:
2022 2023 2024 2025
White 57% 54% 51.56% 50.00%
Hispanic/Latine(x) 30% 31% 34.46% 37.31%
Black 6% 6% 5.93% 6.46%
Asian 3% 3% 3.55% 3.03%
Other RIPA data is available throughout the annual report’s respective slide presentation (attached) and provides information on perceived age, gender, reason for the stop, searches conducted, types of property seized, duration of stops, and results of stops.
Calls for service and officer-initiated activity totaled 12,882 in 2025, representing a comparative increase of 272 events to the year prior (2024 totaled 12,610 calls/activities/events). Calls for service were up by 773 and officer-initiated activities were down by 501; however, officerinitiated activities in 2025 remained comparatively higher when associated with the previous two years in 2023 and 2022 (600 more in 2025 versus 2023, and 871 more in 2025 versus 2022).
The Cotati Police Department has continued to center its priorities on safety and enforcement related to driving under the influence (DUI); DUI arrests nearly tripled in 2024 to 224 (78 in 2023) and were similarly high in 2025 at 203. As was the case in 2024, overall reporting, proactivity, arrest statistics, stop data, and associated contacts increased in 2025.
The remainder of the annual report centers on organizational, procedural, and training aspects of the Cotati Police Department, including numerous community outreach efforts that staff were involved in throughout 2025.
Financial Considerations
Sizable data extraction, analysis, formatting, and ultimate reporting require significant staff time.
The addition of the records analyst position has greatly helped to streamline the process of mining and charting data and information, especially with some data that can be challenging to extract and decipher from its raw format. The reliability of such data and the context by which to interpret such data can also be challenging. The continuous mining of data and analytics associated with providing enhanced details of such data may have greater financial impacts in the future.
Environmental Issues
This action is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it is not a project which has a potential for resulting in either a direct physical change in the environment, or a reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change in the environment, pursuant to CEQA Guideline section 15378.
Attachments:
Cotati Police Department “2025 Annual Report FINAL” presentation.