The Dojs Policing Statistics Dont Lie
Three is a pattern, they say, and protesters in Times Square and elsewhere can cite more than three examples Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, and John Crawford and Tamir Rice in Ohio to back up their claim that there is a pattern of excessive force by white law enforcement against black citizens revealing itself in America. But, compelling as these anecdotal examples may be, they are outliers amid a decades worth of data that indicate nothing in the way of systemic bias in encounters between law enforcement and citizens .
Among a variety of other findings, the Bureau of Justice Statistics Police-Public Contact Survey , collected triennially since 1996, estimates the number of citizens who interact with police annually, how those interactions came about, and how citizens assess them. Because BJS conducts interviews with a sample , then extrapolates to the larger population, the numbers are not perfect, but they do offer one reasonable indication of police contact with the American public. In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, 62.9 million U.S. residents age 16 or older, or about one quarter of American adults, had at least one encounter, face-to-face or remote, with police. Half were police-initiated traffic stops accounted for four of every ten encounters , as did citizen requests for assistance .
Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
As Fatal Police Encounters Rise Reformers Demand Change
By: Dana DiFilippo– December 9, 2021 7:00 am
Cecille Hepburns grandson Kashad Ashford was shot and killed by Lyndhurst police in 2014.
In Newark, Damian Dymka was walking on a roadside last month when authorities say an off-duty cop veered off the highway and mowed him down. Instead of calling 911, prosecutors say the cop loaded the body into his car and drove home to ask his mother what to do.
In Newton, a military veteran who served three tours in Iraq became distraught and suicidal last summer. His wife called police for help. Instead, officers gunned Gulia Dale down, 12 seconds after approaching him. Officers say Dale had a gun.
In Trenton, officers pinned Stephen Dolceamore face down in the dirt after a foot chase, kneeling on his back as he shouted, Help! Cant breathe! After he went limp, a cop slapped his neck and asked: He got a pulse? He did but not for much longer.
The three victims were among more than 500 people who died during encounters with New Jersey law enforcement officers in the past two decades. And even as calls for reform have grown louder, fatal police encounters have crept up in recent years in New Jersey, with at least 27 so far this year.
Several bills have been introduced in the Legislature to hold police accountable for missteps they make on the job, bills activists say are critical to reducing fatalities and misconduct that results in injustice and feeds community distrust in police.
No official tally
None of the officers were charged.
Public Release Of Data
Public release of use-of-force data from the National Use-of-Force Data Collection depends on the percentage of agencies contributing data and is governed by federal regulations. Regardless of the level of use-of-force data reported, the FBI will periodically release information on agencies that participate in the data collection.
The FBI released initial data when 40% of the total law enforcement officer population was reached. Additional data will be released at 60% and 80% participation levels.
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Assault Is The Most Common Reason Officers Are Arrested In California
The most detailed public data on police misconduct is the national Police Crime Database, created by Professor Phillip Stinson . The data contain demographic information on the officer and the victim , the officers rank and agency, the date of the incident, the offense, and finally the employment and criminal consequences. It is important to note that the Stinson data likely undercount instances of misconduct for two reasons. First, the data are collected mainly through crowdsourced methods involving Google Alerts and news search engines. Second, the data only capture arrests of police officers and thus misses misconduct cases that could be revealed from additional access to personnel records, lawsuit settlements, and the like. As discussed previously, officers have certain privileges that protect them from civil, criminal, and employment consequences. These privileges also reduce their likelihood of being arrested in the first place.
There were at least 824 arrests of law enforcement officers in California from 2007 to 2016, slightly over 82 per year this means of the almost 78,400 law enforcement officers in California during that time, 0.1 percent were arrested annually. On average, arrested officers were men with about 10 years of experience, and they typically held the lowest rank . The arrests were for 50 different offenses, but a majority of arrested officers faced charges related to violent or sex crimes.
Black People Are Overrepresented In Police Use
Figure 7 shows the racial distribution of all individuals seriously injured or killed in law enforcement interactions, along with their share of the states total population and their share of all law enforcement stops among the states 15 largest agencies. Black people are substantially overrepresented. In both the hospital data and the Use of Force data, Black people account for nearly 20 percent of serious injuries and fatalities, even though they comprise less than 6 percent of Californias population. As mentioned above, Black residents are much more likely to be stopped by the police compared to their share of the population this overrepresentation in police contact puts them at a greater likelihood of being subject to police use of force. The share of Black people among all serious injuries and fatalities is still larger than their share among all police stops, though this disparity is considerably smaller .
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The Most Dangerous Thing
Three sheriffs deputies surrounded a beat-up Mercedes with a broken taillight in Clark County, Wash., in February. The tools strewn across the passenger seat worried them immediately, they later told investigators.
That right there can hurt someone, said Deputy Holly Troupe.
The drivers retorts set off more alarms. You need to chill out! she recalled him parroting back to her.
To help force him out of the car, Deputy Sean Boyle punched the driver in the nose. Deputy Troupe grabbed him below the jaw in what she called pain compliance. But the driver, Jenoah Donald, a 30-year-old mechanic who had autism and struggled with drug addiction, started the car with one hand and clutched Deputy Boyles ballistic vest with the other, the officer later said.
Deputy Boyle, though he had 70 pounds on the driver, told investigators he had feared he might be stuck half-inside a moving car: I was convinced, This is how you are going to die, he later told investigators. So he shot Mr. Donald in the head.
Prosecutors questioned whether the stop would have ended differently if the officers had explained to the driver why they were ordering him to leave the car. But Deputy Boyle, with two decades on the job, had fired in good faith, the prosecutors concluded.
Some officers involved in fatalities at vehicle stops cite their training, which for decades has stressed the perils of those interactions.
Likely A Record Breaking Year For Deaths By Police In Canada
Each year approximately five million Canadians encounter some type of confrontation with police. The majority of these occurrences end without incident, however, roughly 30 civilians die each year following an encounter with the police in Canada. This year has been an especially violent one with 30 civilians killed after police used force during the first half of 2020.
There is no official agency in Canada collecting or tracking the details of these police vs. civilian incidents of death. CBC researchers, therefore, began tracking encounters between police and civilians that ended in death in an effort to build a national database and gain insight into the circumstances surrounding these fatal confrontations.
DEADLY FORCE DATABASE
CBC researchers examined thousands of independent investigator reports, coroner reports, court records, news reports and conducted family interviews to create the Deadly Force database, which is updated and maintained by CBCs own researchers. The database does not include those who suffered in-custody deaths, self-inflicted wounds as a result of suicide or attempts to evade the police, or accidental police-related deaths .
CBC researchers found more than 460 incidents between 2000 and 2017. Approximately 70% of the cases involved fatal police shootings.
CBC researchers also found that the number of cases of civilian death following police encounters has risen over the past 20 years.
CTV NEWS RESEARCH
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Several Data Sources Offer Insight Into Police Use Of Force
Table 1 briefly summarizes the available sources of information. Three of the data sourcesDeaths in Custody, the Use of Force incident reporting system , and the Racial and Identity Profiling Act stop dataare collected and maintained by the California Department of Justice as required by federal and/or state law. The result of state legislation passed in 2015, the Use of Force data and the RIPA stop data are two relatively new and unique data sources available to examine police use of force. To provide a source of comparison, we also examine information from two additional sources: Fatal Encounters, a crowdsourced effort by journalists and researchers to record fatalities during police interactions, and the California Department of Health Care Access and Information , which we refer to in the report), which publishes data on the cause of all injuries treated in hospital emergency departments and inpatient settings. Note that the Use of Force data, Fatal Encounters, and the hospital discharge data account for all use-of-force incidents with officers, regardless of whether they are on duty or off duty. We discuss all of these data sources in more detail in Technical Appendix A.
Already A Particularly Deadly Year For People Killed In Police Encounters Cbc Research Shows
CBCâs Deadly Force database looks at role of race, mental health in deaths
Inayat SinghCBC News ⢠July 23, 2020
It has already been a particularly deadly year in terms of people killed in encounters with police in Canada â and Black and Indigenous people continue to be over-represented among the fatalities.
There were 30 people killed after police used force in Canada in the first half of 2020, which is the full-year average for such deaths over the past 10 years . This is according to the Deadly Force database, updated and maintained by the CBCâs own researchers.
The database shows Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented amongst the victims compared to their share of the overall population.
The data also finds most of those killed in police encounters suffer from mental illness or substance abuse.
There is no government database listing deaths at the hands of the police available to the public in Canada, so CBC News created its own. The CBCâs research librarians have collected detailed information on each case, such as ethnicity, the role of mental illness or substance abuse, the type of weapon used and the police service involved, to create a picture of who is dying in police encounters.
The database focuses onfatal encounters where police used force. It does not include in-custody deaths, self-inflicted wounds as a result of suicide or attempts to evade police, or accidental police-caused deaths .
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State And Local Expenditures
Spending on police nearly tripled between 1977 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation. Per capita spending on police also grew during this period, but at a lower level, close to doubling . However, spending on law enforcement accounts for a small share of total state and local government expenditures, and that portion has remained virtually unchanged over the past four decades, hovering at around 3.7%. This indicates that total expenditures on other state and local functions, such as K-12 education, post-secondary education, public welfare and healthcare, and roadways, increased at roughly the same rate as police expenditures over the past four decades.
What The Numbers Say On Police Use Of Force
When Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, legislators mandated that the attorney general begin studying and reporting on excessive use of force by police. Soon after, the Bureau of Justice Statistics developed a series of recurring studies that measured everything from police behavior in specific situations, like traffic stops, to incidents in which police use force. Much of the data was based not on reports by local police departments, but on direct surveys of citizens, providing some 20 years of information on how the police interact with American citizens, and how those citizens see the police.
Despite such pronouncements, two decades of data on police interactions with the public dont support the idea that something extraordinary is afoot, that the police are becoming militarized as President Obama has suggested, or that distrust between police and local communities has produced an enormous spike in conflicts. By contrast, the data show that significant crime declines have been accompanied by a leveling off and then a reduction in confrontations with the police, as reported by Americans of all races.
Even if we did, none of this information will make much difference if politicians, activists, and the media keep ignoring it because it doesnt fit the prevailing narrative.
City JournalCity Journal
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Black People More Than Three Times As Likely As White People To Be Killed During A Police Encounter
Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country, with some metropolitan areas showing very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.
The wide variance in deaths by police shows how preventable these deaths are, study authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz, recent graduates from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told UPI in a June 24 article.
Gunshot Injuries Resulting From Police Encounters Are Similar Across The Use Of Force And Hospital Discharge Data
California DOJ Use of Force data OSHPD hospital discharge data.
NOTES: Use of Force data only include gunshot wounds where the person injured was recorded as receiving medical aid at a hospital or medical facility. Gunshot injuries in hospital discharge data are based on external cause of injury codes indicating the injury resulted from a firearm encounter with law enforcement and excludes those that were not identified as serious based on the primary diagnosis. For more information, refer to Technical Appendix A.
The Use of Force data and hospital data also include other serious injuries resulting from police use-of-force incidents. According to the Use of Force data, there were about 365 additional serious injuries sustained during police encounters each year. Some of these injuries include lacerations, bone fractures, and head wounds. The hospital discharge data contain many more reports of serious injuries from police interactionsover 3,000 annually. They also include many more instances of lacerations, broken bones, and head wounds than are reported in the Use of Force data however, it is not possible to determine how severe these injuries were based on the hospital records alone. The Use of Force data should include all injuries that result in serious bodily injury, making it difficult to compare directly with the hospital discharge records. Technical Appendix A provides more details on how we identify serious injuries in the hospital discharge data.
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Statistics About Police Brutality
1. Police officers are indicted in fewer than 1% of killings, but the indictment rate for civilians involved in a killing is 90%.
2. On average, in the United States, a police officer takes the life of a citizen every 7 hours.
3. In 2015, there were 1,307 people who lost their lives at the hands of a police officer or law enforcement official. In 2016, that number was 1,152. Although lower, both years are still higher than the 1,149 people who were killed by police in 2014.
4. 52% of police officers report that it is not unusual for law enforcement officials to turn a blind eye to the improper conduct of other officers.
5. 61% of police officers state that they do not always report serious abuse that has been directly observed by fellow officers.
6. 43% of police officers agree with this sentiment: Always following the rules is not compatible with the need to get their job done.
7. 84% of police officers have stated in a recent survey that they have directly witnessed a fellow officer using more force than was necessary.
8. Just 5% of the police departments in the United States contributed statistics to a 2001 report that was created to track police brutality on civilians.
9. The estimated cost of police brutality incidents in the United States is $1.8 billion.
10. 93.7% of the victims of police brutality that involve the discharge of a weapon are men.
16. The second most common form of police misconduct is sexual assault.
Confidence In The Police
While White and Black people report crimes at similar rates, suggesting similar levels of confidence in the police, they provide starkly different responses when questioned directly about their trust levels. In polls, White people consistently report higher rates of confidence in the police and that high confidence has been stable over time. Overall, confidence in 2020 among White people is about the same as it was in 1994. Black people report having much lower levels of confidence in the police, averaging about 40% lower and showing considerably more volatility over time. Most notably, confidence in police among Black people plummeted to a decades-long low in 2020, 16 percentage points below the 1994 level.
Confidence in Police
Respondents who said they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police.
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