Law enforcement often hides data from public scrutiny
As the nation continues to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, you might be wondering how often these kinds of tragic and deadly police encounters occur.
Here’s the sad truth: Nobody knows. In fact, much about our criminal justice system remains shrouded in secrecy. If lawmakers are going to get serious about reforming police departments, then we need to begin a transparent process of collecting and publishing data on policing.
There are well over 17,000 police agencies across the United States, and yet we have little information on such simple questions as:
• How often does someone die in police custody, and what was the cause of death?
• When police misconduct is implicated, what type of investigation occurred, who was investigated, and what were the results?
• When officers use force, what reasons were given to justify the conduct?
• What training and tactics do police employ?
Scholars who attempt to document these basic facts about police agencies are often frustrated to no end. Jonathan Mummolo of Princeton — who has written some of the best work on how to detect racial bias in policing — found that he could barely get off the ground when he wanted to study the effects of militarized policing.
“I sent hundreds of open records requests to local agencies in search of data on militarization, but learned that many agencies purge records that are more than five or 10 years old, or don’t track the activity of their militarized units at all,” Mummolo wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. “When they do, they often track it poorly, refuse to share it, or release heavily redacted records that are of little use, citing exceptions to open records laws which, quite unhelpfully, vary by state.”
Even the FBI’s National Use
of-Force Data Collection, which was just launched last year, fails to provide an accurate picture. Police agency participation is voluntary and explicitly disallows the collection of “final disposition” information about use-of-force incidents. Such voluntary and low-quality programs make it far too easy for police departments to avoid accountability for how they investigate their own officers.
To be sure, there are a few major police departments nationwide that have been relatively open and transparent. Denver, for example, has an open data set on all officer uses of firearms since 2015.
Still, it is amazing how far some police departments and police unions will go to prevent anyone from knowing the truth.
In Chicago, for example, citizens filed a lawsuit in 2007 asking for freedom of information
access to the misconduct records of the Chicago Police Department. The department doggedly fought the lawsuit for seven years, until an Illinois appellate court finally said the records had to be released.
The city’s two major police unions followed up with another lawsuit in 2014 asking to ban the release of misconduct records that were more than four years old, on the theory that such records would be embarrassing to the policemen involved. Finally, in 2016, an Illinois appeals court ruled that the records had to be released.
The result was the Citizens Police Data Project, which catalogs and maps all of the misconduct complaints in Chicago. The complaint data has already yielded scholarly research that is relevant to understanding the use of force and social contagion in policing.
It shouldn’t take some 10 years and multiple legal battles just to get access to such essential information about how a
key government agency works. There has to be a better way. Fortunately, the new Justice in Policing Act of 2020 — recently introduced in Congress — would be a good start.
For one, it would require law enforcement agencies to create a “national police misconduct registry” intended to track complaints and discipline nationwide, so that agencies would be better able to screen out “bad apples” from other jurisdictions.
For another, the act would require states to report on police shootings, deaths and uses of force, including a wide range of details on the civilians involved, the circumstances and context, and whether officers first tried to de-escalate the situation..
That said, the act could be substantially strengthened. For example, it is well-known that official police reports can omit key details about misconduct, and a federal reporting requirement should include penalties
when official reports are contradicted by video evidence. For another example, the act does nothing to ensure that all of the data will be made available to university researchers and watchdog groups. And while misbehaving police officers may be entitled to the same privacy as any other individual, the act should insulate data collection efforts from lawsuits by police unions that aim to stifle accountability for bad behavior.
The same could be said of the Sandra Bland Act that was enacted in 2017 here in Texas. Among other things, that act requires Texas law enforcement agencies to track and report data on all traffic stops, including racial and ethnic information on who was stopped and whether the person was injured by the officer using physical force. A good start, in theory, but the reality has fallen short. As the Houston Chronicle reported in June, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement somehow left out data on
the driver’s race, making it impossible to measure anything about racial profiling. To quote the Chronicle: “After two decades and three separate laws, efforts to identify which of the state’s nearly 2,000 law enforcement agencies have glaring racial disparities in their policing have largely failed, yielding only a patchwork of numbers with widely varying degrees of usefulness.” After the Chronicle story, the state asked for the data with the driver’s race.
The brutality inflicted on George Floyd should never happen to anyone. But without good data, we have little idea of how many George Floyds have been victimized by police officers. Demanding systematic, transparent, and audited data is a step toward holding police accountable for protecting the lives and well-being of all Americans.