BLACKS IN 25% OF SDPD USE OF FORCE INSTANCES
Study involved about 12K people recorded between 2017-2019
Despite making up only 6 percent of the city’s population, Black people account for nearly one quarter of the individuals San Diego police officers use force against.
The finding stems from a new analysis by Accountability Now, a policing project launched at the beginning of the year that is working to build a national, publicly accessible database on police use of force.
Currently, there are no federal requirements governing how U.S. police agencies track their uses of force. As a result, many departments report their incidents differently, and some barely track it at all.
In 2019, the FBI launched the National Use-of-Force Data collection program, which tracks incidents in which police fire their weapons, cause serious injury or kill people.
But the program is voluntary, and most police departments do not participate. Between January and September of this year, only 40 percent of law enforcement agencies submitted use-of-force data to the FBI.
Police reform advocates have long pushed for a more robust use of force database. Without a standardized system, they say, communities will not be able to advocate for the right kind of changes.
The lack of standard data also hinders the ability of police departments to develop evidence-based best practices for training purposes, reform advocates say.
Accountability Now, created by The Leadership Conference on Civil Human Rights, is meant to provide an example of what a national use-of-force database could look like.
“If we had a full picture of police force, I think it would really open the door for change,” said Bree Spencer, policing program manager at The Leadership Conference. “It makes it much more difficult for decisionmakers to avoid this problem and helps pave the way for something different.”
So far, the project has collected policing data from 30 large police departments, including the San Diego Police Department.
The group looked at nearly 11,000 use-of-force incidents involving nearly 12,000 people reported between 2017 and 2019. During each of those years, Black people accounted for nearly 25 percent of those who experienced force at the hands of police.
Although San Diego po