California's Racial and Identity Profiling Act divides police, activists

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Supporters of the new Racial and Identity Profiling Act gathered outside Gov. Jerry Brown's office Monday. They wanted to thank him for signing the bill into law over the weekend.

Meantime, the Los Angeles police chief says his department already collects data on police stops.

The new law requires local law enforcement agencies to collect demographic data on the people they stop. Supporters who held a news conference in Sacramento believe it will provide information to evaluate potential bias of police officers.

"It gives us the data we need to finally get a systemic understanding of police violence so that we can move from anecdotal accounts and live the experience and narratives of being harmed by law enforcement and being stopped and profiled into a data-driven approach," said Chauncey Smith, a racial justice advocate.

This comes after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Groups such as Black Lives Matter believe there is racial profiling in policing.

Under the law, officers would have to record the perceived race or ethnicity of people they stop, the reason for the stop and whether any arrests were made.

"It's the worst piece of legislation I've seen cross this governor's desk," said Stephen James with the Long Beach Police Officers Association.

James says it will result in more costs for taxpayers and fewer officers in the field. He says every police interaction will require more paperwork.

"That's a lot of lost productivity of patrol time...time where they could be out keeping the community safe," said James. "So it is going to be something that's going to drastically affect police work up and down the state."

"I don't fear information. What I fear is information that is not processed correctly," said L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck.

The LAPD says it already collects stop data, which is very similar to what the state requires. The chief says any new data, however, should not be compared to the overall population. He says they must also consider victimization rates and suspect identity rates.

"There are a lot of areas of our society that have disparate impact on various races, and I think it's important that we view these things in those contexts, and hopefully that's the way that the state will look at this kind of data," said Beck.

The attorney general now has to figure out how to collect the data and how much it's going to cost the state.