Data under attack: What’s at stake when Californians lose access to public information
When the Trump administration took down more than 8,000 pages of government data from federal agency websites in early February, Catalyst California’s Research and Data Analysis team dropped everything to spend a week furiously downloading vulnerable data to protect it.
“It was such a mad dash,” said Leila Forouzan, Senior Manager of Research and Data Analysis. “We worried that the administration would destroy data that we and our community partners rely on, so we had to inventory and download everything we could.”
California uses federal data to track public health, education, employment, and other indicators about its residents that inform the management of state and local public programs as well as budget allocations. It gets help in this work from think tanks and policy nonprofits like Catalyst California.
And one of the major instruments Catalyst California uses to track how Californians are doing is RACE COUNTS, its proprietary, data-driven initiative that uses race as the primary lens to understand inequity in the state. We recently released RACE COUNTS 2024, our annual compendium based on 47 indicators ranging from chronic absenteeism to asthma rates to track racial equity across the state.
This year, for the first time, RACE COUNTS included data on law enforcement traffic stops by county. This data, collected by the California Department of Justice under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (RIPA), examined law enforcement traffic stops in detail. It revealed how disparity operates during police stops, from the initial reason for a traffic stop to whether it resulted in a ticket, an arrest, or no action.
“This is information that human and civil rights organizations fought hard to require the state to collect,” said Matt Trujillo, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Catalyst California. “Until passage of that legislation, there was no systematic way to know how police officers treated drivers and communities of color. We had anecdotes and independent analyses, but that wasn’t enough. Now we have the facts, and we can better promote policies that lead to less fear in our communities.”
For example, RACE COUNTS 2024 showed that in Los Angeles County, police stop Black drivers more than three times as often as White drivers. Though Black residents make up less than 10 percent of the population, these stops are fully 20 percent of all law enforcement traffic stops in the county.
“So many of our families and youth have been traumatized by negative interactions with law enforcement,” said Garrick Galbreath, a youth organizer with Brotherhood Crusade, a Catalyst California partner that works in policing issues. “We support equitable and just policing, and we encourage new, community-based partnerships between the South LA community and law enforcement that reduce unnecessary conflict in Los Angeles.”
Aside from archiving and using federal data in its research, Catalyst California also submits public comment on data collection at every level of government. During the past 18 months, our data team pushed for adding more nuance to the racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. Census by including a Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) category, which we also included in RACE COUNTS 2024 to better understand inequity in terms of those communities. The agency has begun to comply.
But public comment advocacy may also be in jeopardy from this administration. On March 3, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a move to limit public comment in its regulations.
Everyone benefits from government policies driven by accurate data, and everyone hurts when we lose access to that data. Community groups use that data to push for policies that reduce inequity in education, healthcare, and housing, among other issues, thus improving communities’ quality of life. Data erasure returns us back to unchecked, rampant inequity.
We will continue proactively archiving data and logging public comment where possible, and we will look for more ways to protect public data. This administration’s moves show why we must speak up not just about policies but about the data that underpin them.
“The data attacks from the Trump administration reminded me again that as researchers, we have to be guardians of democracy by protecting the people’s information,” Forouzan said. “We have an important role to play in keeping access open.”