STUDY No standards on reporting use-of-force data
lice officials did not comment on the Accountability Now findings, Chief David Nisleit has lhas pledged to examine racial disparities to better understand why they exist. He said they can be addressed through “procedural, operational and strategic decision-making.”
This year, the department also created the Force Analysis Unit, which is charged with analyzing useof-force cases. Officials hope the effort will lead to improved training and less force overall when officers interact with community members.
The Accountability Now report mirrors the findings of several recent studies of San Diego police stops, including a recent report produced by the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit that uses data to help police agencies identify and eliminate bias.
The Center for Policing Equity study found that even after accounting for factors like neighborhood characteristics, poverty and crime rates, Black people were nearly 5 times more likely to be subjected to violence by police than White people.
“When racial disparities are present even when the influence of these neighborhood-level factors is removed from the equation, it suggests officer behavior, or department policy or practices, are likely to be playing a role,” the report read.
Interpreting use-of-force data is often complicated. Since there are no nationwide requirements for how police force is tracked, departments engage in the task very differently.
“It’s highly variable, not only in format, but in the definitions and categories police departments are using to capture use of force,” Spencer said.
Law enforcement in San Diego County reflect this lack of uniformity.
About half of the local police agencies track unique forms of force. As a result, if three officers used physical force during an encounter, only one use-offorce case would be recorded.
The other half of local departments track unique force actions used by individual officers.
Using the previous example, this system would record the three instances of physical force that were used. However, it would not show whether any of the officers used physical force more than once.
Spencer said one of the primary goals of Accountability Now is to draw attention to how much information is missing in the use-offorce data sets that are available.
“Even with these problems in play, we’re still seeing an extremely troubling level of disparity between how Black and Brown people are treated by law enforcement versus everyone else,” Spencer said. “What if we had a clearer picture of the data? What would the disparity look like then?”
All of the information analyzed by Accountability Now is publicly accessible. The project also accepts use-of-force data submissions and provides a request template on its website.