Here is the article;
Data on Use of Force by Police Across U.S. Proves Almost Useless
WASHINGTON — When the Justice Department surveyed
police departments nationwide in 2013, officials included for
the first time a series of questions about how often officers
used force.
In the year since protesters in Ferguson, Mo., set off a
national discussion about policing,President Obama and
his top law enforcement officials have bemoaned the lack
of clear answers to such questions. Without them, the
racially and politically charged debate quickly descends
into the unknowable.
The Justice Department survey had the potential to reveal
whether officers were more likely to use force in diverse
or homogeneous cities; in depressed areas or wealthy
suburbs; and in cities or rural towns. Did the racial makeup
of the police department matter? Did crime rates?
But when the data was issued last month, without a public
announcement, the figures turned out to be almost useless.
Nearly all departments said they kept track of their
shootings, but in accounting for all uses of force, the figures
varied widely.
Some cities included episodes in which officers punched
suspects or threw them to the ground. Others did not.
Some counted the use of less lethal weapons, such as
beanbag guns. Others did not.
And many departments, including large ones such as those
in New York, Houston, Baltimore and Detroit, either said
they did not know how many times their officers had used
force or simply refused to say. That made any meaningful
analysis of the data impossible.
The report’s flaws highlight a challenge for the Obama
administration, which has called for better data but has no
authority to demand that police departments keep track of it.
Those who do keep track are under no obligation to release it.
When the Justice Department’s civil rights investigators have
scrutinized police departments and reviewed records that
would not otherwise have been made public, they have found
evidence of abuse.
In Seattle, investigators reviewed the police department’s
reports on the use of force and found that one out of every
five episodes was excessive. In Albuquerque, investigators
concluded that most police shootings from 2009 to 2012
were unjustified. Such conclusions have been amplified by
videos of deadly police interactions in Cincinnati and
North Charleston, S.C., as well as on Staten Island, and
elsewhere.
But those investigations focus only on departments
suspected of unconstitutional behavior. And police
officers say the videos do not reflect the tens of millions
of interactions that officers and civilians have each year.
Federal estimates have concluded with “substantial confidence”
that, when considered as a percentage of that overall number,
officers use force very rarely.
The Obama administration is trying to enhance police training
and improve relationships between officers and minorities.
But without better data, it will be hard to know if those efforts
are working — or even if use of force was objectively a problem
in the first place.
“It’s a national embarrassment,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a
University of South Carolina criminology professor who often
consults with the Justice Department on its studies. “Right now,
all you know is what gets on YouTube.”
More than 20 years ago, Congress ordered the Justice
Department to collect national data on excessive force by police.
But as demonstrated by the recent survey’s inability to properly
measure any use of force, that obligation has been virtually
impossible to meet, in large part because of the difficulty of
collecting reliable data from the nation’s roughly 18,000 state
and local police departments.
Though many police departments long ago embraced
sophisticated computer analysis for tracking and predicting
crime patterns, they have been slower to do so when tracking
police behavior. Of those departments that require officers to
document their use of force, some attach the information to
police reports, some have separate databases and some keep
the data on paper.
Among the large police departments in the Justice
Department’s survey, slightly more than half said they
documented each use of force individually. About one-fifth,
however, said they documented them by the number of police
reports that mentioned a use of force, which means that each
episode might be recorded several times by different officers.
About one-fifth of departments refused to say how they kept
their data.
That is useful information, as is the data on what tactics
are counted in each city, said KiDeuk Kim, a researcher with
the Urban Institute, which conducted the police survey for
the Justice Department. He conceded, however, that “they’re
less willing to talk about how many incidents they had.”
In private discussions, some police leaders told the Justice
Department that they were reluctant to turn over data that
the department could use to vilify them, officials said.
In New York last year, the police commissioner, William J.
Bratton, displayed bar graphs showing that officers were far
less likely to use force than they were two decades ago. Yet
when New York responded to the Justice Department survey,
it said it did not know how many times the officers had used
force.
That apparent contradiction is further evidence of different
cities counting different things. The New York Police
Department closely tracks how and when its officers use
firearms, batons, pepper spray, stun guns and physical force
while making arrests. The counting is different, however, for
stop-and-frisk encounters, which are not considered arrests.
Any physical contact in those situations is recorded, said
Stephen P. Davis, the police department’s chief spokesman.
Police officers who break up fights or help control a mentally
ill person might make only a note in their log books if the
incidents did not end in arrest.
So when the Justice Department asked for a count of all
use-of-force incidents, Mr. Davis said, the department
could not comply.
“We have been, for a few months, trying to work on some way
to centrally record when force is used in any manner,” he said.
He said no decision had been made on whether to make that
data public. But, he added, “I would imagine if it’s a number we can
accurately grab and document, I don’t see any reason we wouldn’t
make it available.”
Mr. Alpert, the criminologist, said the federal government would
need to attach an incentive, or a requirement, if it wanted to get
reliable information. For instance, he suggested making federal
grant money for police departments contingent on their providing
standardized data.
At the Justice Department, researchers are trying to develop a
reliable way to count the number of people who die nationally
in the course of arrest or in custody. Officials hope to have some
data on the topic in the next 18 months. Collecting and publishing
data on use of force in individual departments, officials said, is
not a priority.
In May, a White House task force recommended that all police
departments publish data on use of force. Rather than try to
compel police departments to do that, the White House started
a voluntary program that helps police departments publish and
use their own data. The program is not specifically focused on
use-of-force data, but Mr. Obama couched that aspect as a suggestion.
“Departments might track things like incidents of force,” he said at
an appearance in Camden, N.J., “so that they can identify and
handle problems that could otherwise escalate.”
Some departments already publish that information. And some
are willing to do it, but might not have the money or sufficient
personnel to begin. The White House is focused, for now, on
helping the departments that are already inclined to release
data. The thinking is that, just as most police departments
now voluntarily report their crime statistics, once a wide swath
of departments make their use-of-force data available, others
will follow suit.
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