Contact Data Reporting (CDR)

PSP planned and began collecting Contact Data Reporting data last year, part of one of the country's most comprehensive traffic-stop data collection efforts. The program is designed to analyze demographic and other information from traffic stops to examine whether any racial or ethnic disparities exist, build trust with the public, and identify opportunities for improvement in policy and training.

Unfortunately, as documented by the results of the data audit in Section 3 of the 2021 Annual Report prepared by the research team, the 2021 data collected had significant issues with reliability and validity that prevented any substantive analyses by the research team. As a result, the research team determined that 2021 would effectively be considered a year-long pilot test, during which several revisions and improvements to the data collection process were implemented based on issues identified both internally and by the research team. In addition, new data fields were added to increase the explanatory power of the research team's future statistical analyses examining post-stop outcomes. Statistical analyses of PSP traffic stop data will begin at the conclusion of the collection of 2022 data. This will ensure that any future decisions about organizational changes to training, policy, and supervision are based on the highest quality data possible, in which both the research team and the PSP can be confident.

PSP also gathered data for the first two quarters of 2022. These reports represent two of three quarterly reports to be provided by the research team based on 2022 CDR data. These reports are designed to update PSP administrators on the data collection progress and to provide initial descriptive analyses of the data collected each quarter. Given the limited number of traffic stops, all the descriptive information reported in this document should be considered preliminary and subject to change based on additional months of data collection. In addition, none of the results reported in the quarterly reports document statistically control for alternative explanations for findings, which will be included in the annual report based on a full year of data and released in spring 2023.

We look forward to receiving the annual report for 2022 year-end report that will include an in-depth analysis of the 12 months of CDR data from Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2022. To this point, we’ve been working with the research team to fine tune the data collection and related details to ensure the highest quality data possible to supports analysis and recommendations made by the research team in the annual report, which will inform PSP’s training, policies and practices going forward.