California published the same year's detention data three times and the numbers differ sixfold

California publishes annual county-level data on involuntary psychiatric detention under a statutory mandate. Three separate documents, all hosted on the state health department’s own domain, all titled as the fiscal year 2019-20 report, carry publication dates of February 2021, July 2021, and August 2022. They do not agree.

The statewide count of adult 72-hour detentions is 17,736 in the first, 29,117 in the second, and 117,620 in the third. Los Angeles County appears as 168 detentions in the first two and 38,849 in the third. None of the three documents contains any language indicating that it revises, corrects, or supersedes another. The department’s own data page currently links the latest version, but the two superseded files remain live at their original addresses, and nothing in either one indicates it has been replaced.

Why three versions is the finding

Welfare and Institutions Code section 5402 requires the California Department of Health Care Services to collect involuntary detention data from every county mental health program and treatment facility and to publish it. The statute exists so that the public, the legislature, courts, and researchers can see how often the state’s power to detain people against their will is used, and where.

That purpose depends on the published number being the number. A reader consulting the official record for how many Californians were held for 72-hour psychiatric evaluation in fiscal year 2019-20 can currently retrieve three different official answers, depending entirely on which file a search engine returns.

The fiscal year in question ended June 30, 2020. Every detention it counts had already happened before the first version was published. Nothing in the world changed between February 2021 and August 2022 to make more people have been detained. Only the record moved.

This is the same argument as Working Paper No. 01 and Working Paper No. 03, which examined published measures that failed to capture what they claimed to measure. The failure here is one step earlier in the chain. The measure is unstable, and the instability is undisclosed.

Data

Three PDF documents retrieved from dhcs.ca.gov on July 28, 2026.

All three are titled “California Involuntary Detentions Data Report, Fiscal Year (FY) 2019/2020.” All three carry a DHCS division attribution, though the division named changes across versions, from Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Services Division in v1 and v2 to Licensing and Certification Division in v3.

Both the raw admission count tables and the rate per 10,000 tables were parsed from the text layer. Rate values in these documents always print with one decimal place and raw counts always print as integers, which provides a reliable structural test for distinguishing the two tables. Values suppressed by DHCS appear as *** or * and are recorded as missing rather than zero.

Reports for FY2011-12, FY2013-14, FY2017-18, FY2018-19, FY2020-21, and FY2021-22 were also parsed, to establish whether the values in each version are plausible against neighboring years.

Known limitations

Version 3 contains fewer county rows. This extraction recovers 57 county rows from v1 and v2 but only 30 from v3. Several counties present in the earlier versions, including Sonoma, Contra Costa, and Mendocino, produce no value in v3. This paper does not claim those counties were deleted. Later DHCS reports adopt a convention of leaving a county blank when it contains no LPS-designated facility, and v3 may have adopted that convention early. The distinction matters and is unresolved. It is reported as an observation, not a finding.

The department’s current link points to v3. As of July 28, 2026, the DHCS data page lists the FY2019-20 report at a path resolving to FY19-20-IDR-Report.pdf, which is v3. A reader who navigates the official page today receives the corrected file. The two earlier versions remain live at their original addresses and are still reachable by search, which is the channel through which a stale figure would most plausibly be retrieved.

Method

Step 1. Extract both tables from all three versions. For each county, capture the adult 72-hour value from the raw count table and from the rate table separately.

Step 2. Compare like to like. Align the three versions on county name and compute the difference across versions for the same county in the same fiscal year.

Step 3. Rule out a denominator revision. A rate is a count divided by a population estimate. If California’s Department of Finance had revised county population estimates between publications, rates could move while the underlying counts stayed fixed. Comparing raw counts across versions distinguishes the two cases directly.

Step 4. Rule out redistribution between counties. If counties were reassigning detentions among themselves under the facility-based reporting rule, individual counties would move while the statewide total held roughly constant. Comparing statewide totals across versions tests this.

Step 5. Search for disclosure. Search the full text of all three documents for the terms a revising agency would ordinarily use: revised, corrected, supersedes, erratum, amended, updated version, previously published, replaces.

Findings

The statewide total moves by a factor of 6.6

Adult 72-hour evaluation and treatment, fiscal year 2019-20, statewide:

Children’s 72-hour detentions move similarly, from 3,566 to 6,962 to 22,826.

The second version corrects exactly one county

The difference between v1 and v2 is 11,381 adult detentions. San Diego County appears as 0.0 per 10,000 in v1 and 44.4 in v2, and no other county changes. San Diego’s adult population places its v2 count at approximately 11,100, which accounts for essentially the entire statewide difference between the two versions.

So v2 is not a general revision. It is v1 with one county added, published five months later, with no indication that it differs from its predecessor.

Individual county revisions reach two orders of magnitude

Adult 72-hour raw admission counts:

The corresponding rates per 10,000 move proportionally: Los Angeles from 0.2 to 50.5, Sacramento from 0.9 to 81.6, Stanislaus from 0.0 to 102.3.

Los Angeles County is the largest county in the United States. For roughly eighteen months, the official public record of how many of its adult residents were detained for involuntary psychiatric evaluation in fiscal year 2019-20 was 168.

The revision is not an artifact of population estimates

Rates and counts move together and by comparable magnitudes. A denominator revision cannot produce a 231-fold increase in a raw headcount.

Back-solving the implied adult population from each version’s count and rate pair gives 30.06 million, 29.71 million, and 29.85 million. Those agree within one percent across all three publications. The count changed. The denominator did not.

The revision is not redistribution between counties

The statewide total does not hold constant. It rises from 17,736 to 117,620. Information entered the record that was previously absent, rather than moving between counties within a fixed pool.

No version discloses the existence of any other

A full-text search of all three documents for revised, corrected, supersedes, erratum, amended, updated version, previously published, and replaces returns nothing in any of the three. Each document presents itself as the report for fiscal year 2019-20, without qualification.

The plausible values are the late ones

Against neighboring years, the v3 figures are the credible ones and the earlier versions are the outliers. Los Angeles reports adult 72-hour rates of 70.4 in FY2017-18, 46.8 in FY2018-19, and 60.5 in FY2020-21. The v3 value of 50.5 sits inside that range. The v1 and v2 value of 0.2 does not.

This matters for how the finding should be read. The early versions were wrong by amounts large enough to invert any conclusion drawn from them.

The republication pattern may not be specific to this fiscal year

The currently published FY2015-16, FY2016-17, and FY2018-19 reports each carry a date stamp of October 2021, several years after their respective fiscal years closed. Multiple historical years appear to have been republished in a single month.

This is an observation, not a finding. It does not establish that those years had earlier versions with different values, only that the current files were issued long after the periods they describe. Testing whether the pattern documented here for FY2019-20 extends to other years would require locating the earlier files, which has not been done.

Some published values cannot be correct in any version

Extracting the raw count tables across every available year surfaces arithmetic that cannot be correct regardless of any revision history.

Of 199 county-year observations where both figures are published, 19 report more 14-day certifications than 72-hour holds. A 14-day certification follows a 72-hour hold. Under facility-based reporting a modest excess is possible, since a person may be held in one county and certified in another, but the magnitudes here are not modest.

Sonoma’s rate table confirms the count table rather than correcting it, publishing 27.0 adult 72-hour detentions per 10,000 alongside 196.0 fourteen-day certifications per 10,000. A 14-day certification rate of 196 per 10,000 residents is not a possible value.

A separate check runs the same test from the other direction. Dividing a published count by its published rate recovers the population denominator the department used. For most counties this returns a sensible figure: Los Angeles 7.7 million adults, Kern 626,000, Humboldt 108,000. For Ventura in fiscal year 2018-19 it returns 39,139, against an actual county population of roughly 840,000. Ventura also returns two incompatible populations in adjacent years.

These are not revision artifacts. They appear inside single published documents and are internally inconsistent within them.

What this does and does not support

Supported.

• Three documents published on dhcs.ca.gov, dated February 2021, July 2021, and August 2022, each present themselves as the FY2019-20 involuntary detention report and report materially different values.
• The statewide adult 72-hour count differs by a factor of 6.6 between the earliest and latest.
• Los Angeles County’s adult 72-hour count differs by a factor of 231.
• The July 2021 version differs from the February 2021 version by the addition of a single county.
• The revisions reflect changes in counted admissions rather than changes in population denominators.
• No version contains language disclosing that it revises another.
• The latest values are consistent with adjacent fiscal years and the earliest values are not.
• As of July 28, 2026, the DHCS data page links the August 2022 version.
• Across all available years, 19 of 199 county-year observations report more 14-day certifications than 72-hour holds, and in several cases the rate table confirms rather than corrects the count table.
• Inverting a published rate against its published count returns an implausible population denominator for at least one county-year.

Not supported.

• This paper makes no claim about why the early versions were incomplete. The likeliest explanation is ordinary late county reporting, which is unremarkable in itself. The finding concerns publication practice, not county conduct.
• It does not claim any county violated its reporting obligation. The data cannot distinguish a county that submitted late from one that submitted on time into a system that failed to compile it.
• It does not claim DHCS acted improperly. Agencies revise data. The narrow claim is that these revisions are not disclosed within the documents themselves.
• It does not claim counties disappeared from v3. The reduced county count in v3 may reflect a formatting convention for counties without LPS-designated facilities. This is unresolved and is stated as an observation.
• It does not establish that other fiscal years had multiple versions. The October 2021 date stamps on several older reports are consistent with that possibility and do not demonstrate it.
• It says nothing about whether any individual detention was appropriate. Nothing in this data speaks to that.
• It does not support using FY2019-20 in any trend analysis without specifying which version was used. That is the practical consequence for other researchers and is the most useful thing this paper offers them.

Reproduction

The repository contains three scripts:

• fetch_lps_reports.py, document discovery. Note that dhcs.ca.gov serves an Incapsula challenge to some scripted requests, so the PDFs must be retrieved through a browser. This is documented rather than circumvented.
• parse_lps_tables.py, county-level extraction using the decimal-format structural test described in the data section.
• pressure_test_versions.py, the four verification checks in the method section.

A dataset snapshot with retrieval date July 28, 2026, and the three source PDFs by their original filenames, are included so that the comparison can be re-run against the files as they existed on that date.

Data: California Department of Health Care Services, Involuntary Detentions Data Report FY2019-20, three versions, retrieved July 28, 2026. Code and data snapshots: zatara-research-data/04-three-versions.

@techreport{zatara2026paper4,
  title       = {Revision without disclosure in California involuntary detention reporting},
  author      = {Zatara, David},
  year        = {2026},
  institution = {Independent Researcher},
  type        = {Working Paper},
  number      = {4}
}