Many governments have proposed “equity initiatives.” Seattle-King County’s Equity and Social Justice initiative, for instance, calls for applying an “equity lens” to policy analysis and for “all county employees to advance equity through their daily work.” How should such initiatives be understood and implemented in bureaucratic decisions? This Essay argues that equity dimensions of regulatory enforcement are pervasive, if unrecognized. Based on collaborative work with the food-safety program of the largest health department in Washington State (Public Health–Seattle and King County), I use large-scale inspection microdata, merged with census and social media information, to illustrate three such dimensions. First, as an empirical matter, equity considerations pervade the exercise of discretion by the many frontline employees who implement an agency’s policies. When it comes to enforcement—including equity considerations—an agency is a “they,” not an “it.” Second, I demonstrate that recent proposals for food-safety agencies to use big data to target inspections would have considerable distributive implications, shifting public enforcement resources away from minority and immigrant areas and importing the digital divide into regulatory enforcement. Third, information disclosure in the form of restaurant letter grading presents complex equity trade-offs. Conventional letter grading ignores differences in inspection stringency, resulting in dramatic geographic differences solely due to the identity of the inspector. I demonstrate how to design a more accurate and consistent grading system, but I also show that this system can magnify differences across cuisines. These case studies demonstrate both the profound challenge and opportunity presented by data-driven approaches in giving content to “equity initiatives” in the bureaucracy.

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