Summary
Published Date: November 04, 2024
Authors update all RACE COUNTS data possible each year to provide the community with the most recent racial equity data. When an important new indicator is published, we also add it to our data. This year’s updates included three meaningful improvements:
- First, the California Department of Justice has published new, more comprehensive data on law enforcement traffic stops for cities, counties, and the entire state. Authors added officer-initiated stops to RACE COUNTS as an indicator for you to show results where one live.
- Second, the California Department of Education has published data for the 2022 to 2023 school year, giving us a sense of the post-COVID educational landscape, in which chronic absenteeism now plays a larger role. Added data show what has changed at the state, county, and school district levels.
- Third, this update includes the best available data to date for BIPOC groups. The biggest addition is the fourteen indicators now available for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Californians. Additionally, the study also include one more year of pooled survey data from sources like the California Health Interview Survey, which gives us more stable data for BIPOC groups.
Findings: The updated RACE COUNTS data reveal inequities Californians face more clearly than ever before, shows less impact from short-term variations caused by COVID, and includes detailed data for many groups that were invisible in previous analyses. Findings include:
- statewide, law enforcement officers are more than twice as likely to stop Black Californians than the average Californian.
- Black, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native students in California are all 3.5 times more likely to be chronically absent from school than the group with the lowest absenteeism rate.
- statewide, Southwest Asian and North African residents are the most likely racial group to live near environmental hazards.
