Palo Alto Police Department Responses to Recommendations from the National Policing Institute (NPI) Report
February 2026
The following information is organized by recommendation as labeled by NPI. These are responses from the Palo Alto Police Department.
Data Infrastructure and Collection
The Palo Alto Police Department (“the Department”) collects data as legally required by the RIPA Act. Collecting RIPA-analogous demographic data for all police-public contacts is not practicable as it would be overly burdensome due to the many community interactions that officers have daily. Additionally, the brevity of many interactions (and the ubiquity of e-mail and telephonic interactions) makes collecting meaningful demographic data problematic.
Consistent with the RIPA Act, for stops initiated due to a traffic violation, the Department already documents whether the violation is a moving violation, an equipment violation, or a non-moving violation, as well as the specific CA Vehicle Code section violated. The Department is exploring whether its RIPA Data Dashboard can be modified to allow the data set to be sorted at an even greater level of specificity.
The RIPA Act sets forth a specific set of data points to be collected. The application that the Department uses to make RIPA data entries is an industry standard tool, used by a majority of CA agencies, that has been specifically designed to collect the prescribed data set. The Department cannot customize existing fields, and its ability to add non-mandatory fields is limited.
Stop location data is captured via the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system and derived from officer radio traffic or information provided by a reporting party (in the case of a dispatched call for service). When broadcasting the location of a stop, officers are trained to use landmarks, intersections, or 100 blocks for officer safety reasons (i.e., so that other officers can quickly locate the stop if help is needed). This practice does not diminish the precision of stop location data in a way that would meaningfully impact analysis.
The Department’s CAD and report-writing systems are already integrated. The Department will explore whether further integration of these systems, and other disparate systems, is feasible, and whether future analysis could include this broader dataset.
Strategic Monitoring and Analysis
Going forward, the Department will review year-over-year RIPA data sets on an annual basis, in order to better track changes over time, identify any outliers and anomalies, and to evaluate alignment with community priorities.
Public Transparency and Dashboard Enhancements
The data points prescribed by the RIPA Act changed from 2023 to 2024, making year-over- year data comparison (and visual representation) challenging for those years. The Department is hopeful that, going forward, the standardized data fields will alleviate these issues.
Of note, the Department was the first (and continues to be the only) local law enforcement agency in the Bay Area to maintain a sortable RIPA data dashboard. The dashboard is not required by statute and goes beyond the state requirements to collect and post static data.
The Department will continue to update the dashboard’s functionality annually, as resources permit, to improve the user interface and will use the recommendations from the report as suggestions.
The Department will continue to maintain a dedicated RIPA webpage, which includes explanations of how RIPA data is collected and processed, and where it is limited.
Community Engagement and Qualitative Research
Per the recommendation in the NPI report to create a space for feedback, the Department has added to its dedicated RIPA webpage a “community feedback” function, which allows community members to submit questions, comments or concerns.