How we built the largest database of police use of force in N.J. history
nj.com
nj.com
VICE did a mass records request for shooting incidents (again, a subset of use of force) from the 50 largest police departments. It took them 9 months to collect the data [1]
[0] https://invisible.institute/police-data/
[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
I have this pet theory ...
It attempts to list all police killings in the US. Unfortunately it looks like they stopped in the middle of this year due to lack of support, but there is five years of interesting past data still there.
Proof: https://twitter.com/EPetenko/status/1069664096042270720
- NYCLU won a lawsuit that forced the NYPD to release a database of their stop-and-frisk activity. The analysis of the data -- which showed a huge racial disparity in who was targeted -- was instrumental in winning a court order to reform the practice. In 2011, the NYPD committed 685K stop-and-frisks. In 2017, they did 10K. [0]
The ACLU of Northern California [1] filed records requests with 63 California police departments to uncover their financial deals with Geofeedia, a tech company that claimed to offer crime/protest detection using real-time feeds from Facebook/Instagram/Twitter's APIs. Geofeedia, which had recently raised $24M, had to vastly cut its operations after the tech companies shut off API access.
[0] https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p...
Am I wrong to read this as "if we can't be racist about it we're just not going to do it as much"
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-... for more information
The point of stop and frisk is essentially to hassle everyone in a perceived high crime area and grab people with warrants, etc.
My dad worked in NYC public housing in the 90s, and these aggressive policing measures were both effective and welcomed (to a point) by the community, as it pushed out people that were ruining their homes and lives.
Like all things bureaucracy, the metrics ended up mattering more than reality. Aggressive policing became systematic harassment and the police go out of their way to not see things. That’s why you can walk through Rockefeller Center and observe scam cartoon characters hustle tourists 6 feet away from police details. Good metrics are valued higher than the public.
Police brutality is a serious problem and data like this should be available, but several things here are (maybe intentionally) provocative:
1. Listing the officers by name is a kind of online vigilantism that ultimately might threaten their personal safety. It doesn't sit well with me at least. This data should be anonymized.
2. The prominence of graphs that conflict race of officer with race distribution of the community. Race should really be stripped from this kind statistic. Race is a social construct based on superficial attributes that does not carry any explanatory meaning. It mostly serves to underpin racist prejudice, which in turn serves to blur out the real reasons for a problem.
However, as cliched as this is, with great power comes great responsibility. And there are those, especially in law enforcement, who take their power for granted and use it to harm and, in some cases, kill people.
As soon as:
* The blue code of silence collapses.
* Judges and politicians stop covering for cop brutality and protecting cop killers.
* Police are more than half as likely to die on the job as a trash collectors.
I'll maybe start to buy this line of reasoning.
It's an insult to the memory of every unarmed, peaceful citizen who has died at police hands to pretend that vigilantism is potentially a bigger problem than police brutality.
How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy? Yes, their fatality rate is around half that of a trash collector. Since when was HN anti-privacy?
You can use data like this to analyze and criticize the system, but I see no reason why the officers' identities would be helpful for any legitimate purpose, especially weighed against their privacy and the danger of such exposure in this heated political environment.
Who was debating whether police officers deserve privacy? That's a question for theologians. The debate was about whether the threat to police officers' safety was an important enough factor to the public to merit censoring their names from reports of their conduct.
If policework is currently less dangerous than trash collecting, that's an obvious argument against. I like the economic argument: if you prefer your violence anonymous, quit and find another job.
Years ago, David Simon (creator of The Wire and The Deuce), wrote about the difficulty in getting the name of an officer behind a fatal shooting. [0] That officer turned out to have a prior incident of a shooting, and the case against the surviving suspect ended up being dropped. If the prerogative is “prioritize police privacy”, where would thenline be drawn for when transparency is/isn’t allowed?
0: https://davidsimon.com/in-baltimore-no-one-left-to-press-the...
I think this data is valuable for two things:
1. Discovering systemic problems. Why does department A have so many cases of use of force? It might be racism. It might be bad training. It might be underfunding/understaffing. Or any number of other things.
2. A complex analysis of individual police officers within departments. Is this officer outside a standard deviation in use-of-force with officers within the same department or patrolling the same beat or answering the same type of calls? Is the demographics of his use of force against individuals inconsistent with the demographics of the area? Is he largely using force against suspects who are not charged with a crime or are charged with a non-violent crime?
Publishing these names has questionable value and is unlikely to lead to any type of complex analysis. Already most of the arguments for publishing the names are doing so on the basis of a presumption of guilt.
Who is "they"?
I also expect that, even in the worst case you are trying to imply, I would feel the same way about publishing the names for the same reasons. I think you are either trying to get me to admit that–which I do freely–, or you are simply uncomfortable that you and I have a different position on the tradeoffs.
Yes, we obviously have a different position about the trade offs, that’s why I replied to your comment in the first place. However, what I’m arguing is that your current position is untenable. It is not logistically or morally feasible for a news org to provide upon request info that it has used its editorial judgment to redact.
Or perhaps uneven distribution of violent crime among departments. http://blogs.kcrw.com/dna/gang-borders-create-invisible-wall...
They get paid to serve and protect and no one is asking for their cancer status. Everything they do is public, so it's well within our rights to know how many times they used force. Now if Officer Tim used force four times more than others in the same area and years, we can wonder...
The Citizenry should have privacy while the government should be transparent.
Tangent: Somewhere along the lines this has flipped and we've somehow stumbled into a situation where the government believes it deserves privacy and owes the citizenry none. I'm not sure how we ended up flipped, but it is not a good sign. This can probably go without saying considering the user-base here, but if we don't know what our government is doing, we can't hold them accountable and we have no idea for who or what to vote.
Tangent to the tangent: If we're not careful, we might end up with new classes divisions, those who have both privacy and access to our data, and those who have neither privacy nor access to data, even their own. Strange times.
I just wonder: is there a better way than giving names to the public to make mob-rule style decisions? It's impossible for us to know the full context (which is maybe something the government should strive to provide for all instances of police response), and I can't help but feel that the public will make sweeping decisions, without due process, and without proper examination (which again, seems currently implausible).
While it's possible someone with more use of force is a rabid psychopath, it's also possible they've been in a lot of unlucky situations. I doubt the general public consider how true randomness can sometimes result in use-of-force outliers that are in fact behaving just fine, and have had a stroke of bad luck.
Why should there be any expectation of privacy about what someone does during the course of their job paid for by tax payers that also involves direct interaction with the public?
This sounds like expecting us to anonymize what politicians do in some sort of weird effort to protect the "privacy" of their public actions.
The fact remains: the patterns of violence perpetrated by police indicate a distinct lack of regard for the value of the lives of people who are black.
It’s incredible how easily a police officer will beat, shoot, or kill a person of color.
And as a person of color myself, I find it alarming and gross when I read comments such as yours.
Honest question: where did I dismiss racist policing, not to mention pseudoscientifically? I really can't find it. For the record, I agree with all your statements from "The fact remains" and forward up until the last sentence.
To clarify FWIW: the problem is not race, it is racism. I find it problematic that the way this database is presented points rather to the former than the latter.
The variety and depth of your identified misconceptions should compel you to question the body of axioms and ideas on top of which you confidently espouse such demonstrably problematic arguments.
I grant you points for rhetoric elegance with that line though [0], but it would be even more helpful if you would exemplify that assumed body of axioms and ideas (after which I expect to prove you wrong).
[0] "the body of axioms and ideas on top of which you confidently espouse such demonstrably problematic arguments"
In a lot of cases, racial prejudice is the problem, or a significant aspect of it. Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.
Yes, I'm sure, and racism is for sure "a significant aspect" of police brutality, I don't contest it. But racism is nonetheless merely a stupid pattern of thought, and I oppose the notion that combating it is to apply more racism.
You'll note that the database doesn't analyze racism, it analyses race.
It's impossible to do any analysis of racial disparity unless the race element is specifically recorded. And, as data collection is as much a political endeavor as it is technical, not every agency or state tracks race.
You can see a not-quite complete collection and comparison of nationwide police data in the Stanford Open Policing Project (disclosure: started by one of my former colleagues) [0], and which states do/don't track driver race. Not all states have agreed to release their data.
I wonder how you propose that a database "analyze racism"? A database contains data. If it's hard as it is to define and get data on race, you think there exists an arbiter and resulting data source for racism?
> I wonder how you propose that a database "analyze racism"?
I note that we are in agreement: you can't surmise racism from this kind of data, still that's what the presentation implies. To be able to establish the extent of racism one would have to conduct attitude research (psychological profiling) on the officers.
How is your stance any different from the common and absurd refrain that discussing racism is racist? We can't discuss racism without looking at race.
It merely means that race is something that doesn't exist outside of the social conventions of a society, an identity pasted onto oneself or someone else based on superficial and meaningless biological attributes.
Racism can be physically dangerous if 'race' is associated with ethics (be it high or low), such as in this database. But mainly, racism is just stupid (i.e. it obfuscates the real issues).
To think of 'race' as a meaningful category in research underpinning policy mostly proves to an outsider how ingrained racism is in the US.
With this in mind, are police not agents working on behalf of a society? Funded largely (if not solely) by members of that society?
You don't have to look much further than "blue lives matter" to see that police in America are almost looked at as a psuedo-race.
> racism is just stupid (i.e. it obfuscates the real issues).
A lot of people think Racism in policing is the real issue. A core one. What do you think the real issues that are being obfuscated are?
Where do I claim that racism is a social construct? I said 'race' (not racism).
It may be a social construct, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
Bias is real. Race-based bias is real. People make decisions based on conscious and unconscious thoughts and beliefs about race. This has been demonstrated through numerous behavioral studies.
What if the real reasons for a police departments behavior involve internally common beliefs about a particular race? What if a majority of police in a particular department just don't like Asians, for example? In that case, race is very relevant to the "real reasons for a problem."
I would love to say racism would go away if we just stopped acknowledging race, but the fact remains that many, many people have closely held beliefs about a particular race, whether it's out-and-out racism, or whether it's the assumption that a black kid in a mostly white neighborhood walking alone must necessarily be an intruder.
In 2018, we can't discuss real reasons for police violence without race. In many cases, it is the reason.
> In that case, race is very relevant to the "real reasons for a problem."
I'm sure you mean that racism is very relevant etc.
> In 2018, we can't discuss real reasons for police violence without race. In many cases, it is the reason.
Same here, you can't reasonably mean that race "is" the reason for police violence, you (most probably) meant that racism is the reason for police brutality.
This kind of mixing up of the concepts is precisely what I object to.
These statistics shouldn't need to be publicly done by independent groups, but could easily be done confidentially by the police departments themselves to avoid having to pay out compensation for their employees' crimes. Alas, police forces find it easier to double down and shirk off liability for the damage they cause, so here we are.