White House Police Data Initiative Could Lead To Reform -- If The Public Demands It

We entrust police officers with the ability to use deadly force when necessary to uphold their oaths to protect and serve the public. In many states and cities, however, the public still doesn't know just how many times a year the cops apply deadly force, or to whom. The federal government , concerned citizens and multiple media organizations are working to bring transparency to this issue. In some cases, they're even working together.

In addition to databases at Deadspin , Gun Violence Archive and FatalEncounters.org , The Washington Post is compiling a list of every fatal shooting by a police officer in the line of duty. A list like that, however, would not include Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, both of whom died during their interactions with police without a single shot being fired. The Guardian has gone one step further than the Post, tracking all people killed by police in the United States by any means, as has the Killed by Police Facebook page . These efforts, as you might expect, are registering a much higher count of police killings than the ones that focus only on shooting deaths. Critics argue , however, that by including traffic incidents and similar accidents in the overall tally, it misleads the public and robs the data of context.

In 2000, Congress required federal law enforcement agencies to report to the Department of Justice the number of people who die during an arrest or in custody. As Mother Jones has reported , Congress has passed other laws requiring the DOJ to track the use of excessive force by U.S. police officers, but consistent, quality data collection is still not happening.

Last month, the DOJ released a new tranche of data from more than 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies. But a New York Times investigation found this data to be virtually useless for analysis. While almost all police departments track shootings, there's great variation in how closely departments record the use of other types of force -- if they even record it at all. And historically, that information has rarely been published online for the public to see.

As Times reporters Sarah Cohen and Matt Apuzzo observed , this state of play represents a significant challenge for the White House's Police Data Initiative, which launched in May .

President Barack Obama can call for more and better data on the use of force by police officers, but the White House has no authority by which it can make local jurisdictions track or disclose this information.

That's unfortunate, since there's a lot that the public and civil rights investigators could learn from analyses of that data, as Cohen and Apuzzo reported:

When the Justice Departments 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 Departments 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.

This week, six months into his tenure as the country's chief data officer, DJ Patil released a memo explaining how the federal government has been using data to benefit the public . I asked Patil about the initiative in May at the International Open Data Conference in Ottawa -- specifically, about what kinds of law enforcement data should and shouldn't be open, and to whom, and why. My question comes at about 30:30 in the video below.

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