Police-reform stats fit for sports geeks
American sports fans are famous for knowing the stats on their teams, their players and their leagues — from hometown high schools all the way up to the pros. If only the same energy and focus could be devoted to compiling and reporting injuries and deaths due to law enforcement, from the local to national level.
Today, boundaries are blurring between sports, politics and policing. At the crux is the enduring problem of excessive use of force by the police, disproportionately directed at persons of color.
The current controversy, of course, started in August 2016, when 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick, in an act of protest, chose not to stand for the national anthem. Motivated by protests against unjust and unpunished police killings of black persons, Kaepernick stated: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Today Kaepernick remains a free agent, and his stats have become part of the controversy surrounding his continuing unsigned status. And that’s deeply ironic.
Thanks to the deepening devotion of energy, time and money on sports statistics in our Moneyball moment, we know Kaepernick’s pass attempts, completions, yards, touchdowns, interceptions, first downs, long first downs, sacks, fumbles, passer rating, defense-adjusted yards above replacement, unadjusted yards above replacement, defense-adjusted value over average, unadjusted value over average, plays and yards where the quarterback drew defensive pass interference, and of course the myriad percentages and percentile rankings that are based on this quantitative cornucopia. For many players, such data are available not only for pro seasons, but also for college and high school.
By contrast: There are next to no credible U.S. stats on deaths and injuries due to law enforcement.
To counter this problem, back in June 2015, the Guardian — a British newspaper! — launched a new project, “The Counted,” devoted to counting the number of persons killed in the U.S. by the police.
Within days, The Guardian’s count reached over 500 deaths, double the estimate from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Presented with such evidence of gross underreporting, then-FBI Director James Comey publicly conceded that it was “ridiculous,” “embarrassing” and “unacceptable” that a British newspaper had better data on police killings than the U.S. government.
How could this data problem be solved? The Obama administration, with a now-quaint belief in data and evidence, launched a pilot project in the Department of Justice that built on the Guardian’s approach of crowdsourcing and data-mining. Since Trump’s inauguration, that project has gone silent.
If we really think they matter more than TDs, INTs, DYAR, VOA and QBR, we need to rethink the collection of data on police-related deaths and injuries right now.
We could re-boot the promising but now dormant DOJ pilot project and bring it online, big time. We could require that deaths due to legal intervention be reported as “notifiable conditions” and thus become regular real-time public health statistics. We could require that law-enforcement agencies report such deaths to health departments, as Tennessee now does.
The independent work of policy wonks, social scientists and public health professionals is clearly not enough to move along this agenda of counting for accountability.
To even the score, we invite America’s sports geeks to begin by perusing the stats on injury and deaths due to police brutality, as currently recorded in U.S. criminal justice and public health data. The lousy state of these data compared to data on your favorite pro, college, high school, junior-varsity and even fantasy teams will shock you.
Then you might demand that we, as a country, up the analytics — and provide real data, in real time, to make sure we know what the problem is, and where it is, so that we can take steps, together, to document and redress the wrongs we need to right.