The DOJ-mandated Community Survey — administered by UCLA, blessed by the Monitoring Team, run for 12 months at a cost of up to half a million dollars — sampled 0.09% of the county. It undercounted the Hispanic/Latino majority by 30.8 points. It routed 70% of responses through KCSO's own website. Then it published "66% feel safe" as the headline.
The Stipulated Judgment required a "reliable, comprehensive, and representative" sample. The survey itself admits Hispanic and Black community members are underrepresented. That admission is buried; the demographic delta is not.
The people who bear the brunt of KCSO's violence — Hispanic, Black, low-income, young, undocumented — were the least likely to respond. The people who found the survey through KCSO's own promotional channels — 70% of the sample — were the most likely to be favorable. This is not measurement of community trust. It is measurement of marketing reach.
The survey's own racial cross-tabs are devastating. They were moved into an interactive online dashboard so a reader has to click, filter, and dig to find them. The Executive Summary leads with "66% feel safe" instead. That's not transparency. That's obfuscation.
The 2022–2023 survey asked residents whether they would avoid calling KCSO for a mental-health crisis out of fear the agency would mishandle it. That finding was buried in the appendices.
On April 9, 2026, a 59-year-old Navy veteran named David Morales — legally disclosed firearms, no VA wellness check offered, no crisis line called, no veterans' court — was crushed under a 14-ton armored vehicle after an 8-hour siege over an $11,868 mortgage default. The survey measured the fear. Morales's death proved the fear was rational.