Under a state law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015, police in California are supposed to record the race of everyone they stop and enter that information into a statewide database.
The law, which has not yet taken effect, is meant to track the actions of officers and see if they are disproportionately targeting certain racial groups.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra is taking comment until August 16 on how the law could be regulated before it's finally in effect, which could be as early as next summer.
So how would the law work? When police stop you, they will note certain details about you.
"The officers are supposed to only report the perceived race, as well as perceived gender and sexual orientation of the person they've stopped," says Jack Glaser, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and author of, "Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling."
The officer should not ask you for that information directly, either. That means he or she might be wrong about your identity.
"The most important thing, really from regulatory standpoint, is what is the officer's perception," says Glaser. "It's the perception that drives any biased behavior."
That information in a database could be helpful to researchers like Glaser to find out, for example, if one particular officer in a department keeps targeting people who appear to be black.
It can also be a way to monitor one of the most subtle forms of policing: deciding who to stop and search.
"This is the area where we probably see the greatest degree of racial identity bias occurring," he says.
Glaser adds, though, that this info must be connected with other data on arrest rates to truly be useful in curbing race-based policing in California.