If this topic interests you, worth pointing out some similar projects, such as the Citizens Police Data Project of Chicago, which currently has 247K police complaints (and puts the code/data on Github) [0]. Note that it's about complaints -- not about all use of force, as in the NJ database. It also covers a single agency -- the Chicago PD. Ostensibly, the Chicago PD has put in the work to create a centralized database, making it relatively straightforward to get the bulk data once the records request/lawsuit succeeds. It's a much different situation when trying to corral the records from multiple agencies, all of which have their own IT systems and practices.
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]
Curious why this is downvoted as while I think there are probably much larger factors, the physical size of an officer compared to their use of force is certainly something that would make logical sense to correlate somehow given how society views size and power. If we're going to do a full analysis, why not include it? It could help clarify what psychological factors (which can be affected by how people treat you, which could be affected by height) cause or prevent the use of unnecessary force.
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.
If you like this sort of reporting, please make sure you are a paying subscriber for your local newspaper. We must support this sort of essential journalism with our pocketbooks.
Hello, I've never commented on Hacker News before so please forgive me if I am breaking any rules, but I worked on this project. Let me know if you have any questions about our process. - Erin Petenko, data reporter for NJ.com
The various local branches of the ACLU have been doing some impressive data projects.
- 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.
Only partially. The NYPD was essentially forced by lawsuits and political pressure to shut down stop and frisk. The ACLU lawsuit that parent mentioned, required that police have a valid reason to stop and frisk someone in advance. Think of this as having a business justification for every expense at a company that scrutinizes these requests. Subsequent lawsuits shut down the ability to stop and frisk individuals coming and going from public housing[0]. On top of this, the new NYC mayor, De Blasio, wanted to shut down stop and frisk altogether (one of his major campaign planks).
No, it’s more like it doesn’t accomplish anything.
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.
A database that lists the officers responsible for force by name, frequency and race. Resulting in neat graphs that strongly suggests that police violence is caused by two factors: individuals and/or race.
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.
>Listing the officers by name is a kind of online vigilantism that ultimately might threaten their personal safety.
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.
> * Police are more than half as likely to die on the job as a trash collectors.
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.
Police officers have a vast amount of authority, not just being able to decide when to use lethal force, but in how to or even whether or not to pursue a case. In addition, they are protected by laws and resources that make targeting police for harassment an extremely foolish proposition. Judges and prosecutors don’t have their identities hidden, why would the officer whose testimony is often central and unquestioned to a case?
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?
I'm not sure that's relevant, for two reasons. First, the McCarthy and Stirling et al. already have this data, so if it is needed for criminal or civil cases, likely they would make it available and if not it can be subpoenaed. Second, the majority of these officers aren't involved and won't be involved in a fatal shooting or other serious matters.
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.
You expect the reporters, who are likely continuing to pursue the project and related stories, to operate as a data warehouse for legal and other requests? Nevermind the work it takes to build such a service, journalists are usually extremely reticent to be an active participant for either side for a lawsuit. We usually hear about it in the case of the government demanding a reporter reveal their anonymous sources and unpublished notes. But it goes the other way too. https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/judge-r...
I expect that, given the reporters have already made the information available to the public, that they personally would not have been unamenable to giving it out when the situations you mentioned arose; and that even in the case they were, the existence of the information would make it easier to collect from the department itself and that in any case, the reporters could be subpoenaed for the information. That some evidence can be excluded as immaterial in a different context is largely irrelevant.
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.
But they haven’t made the names-part of the data available to the public, in your scenario. They’ve made an editorial decision that it’s not in the public interest to know the names of the officers — just like most news orgs don’t publish the name of rape victims even though it’s part of the court record. Virtually no news org will want to set a precedent of selectively releasing info that it previously decided it wanted to withhold.
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.
> 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.
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 agree with what you're saying and the sentiment behind it (and the same goes for most of the other replies to my comment).
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.
> How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy?
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.
They aren't in a three letter agency, they are low level public servants. Individuals in such a position must be held accountable for their own actions. The system of police unions protecting them is a different matter.
>>How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy?
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...
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.
> Race is a social construct [...] that does not carry any explanatory meaning.
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.
You're right - the real issue is probably more like the community an officer socializes in versus the one they police. But their own "race" is an easily-obtainable correlated proxy, and if your intention is to enlighten the discourse you'd be better off making the point as a constructive nitpick rather than sounding dismissive.
> 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.
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.
If I said “there are 100 million cats in America” (made up number; I’m not a cat statistics expert), then “cats exist elsewhere” would not be a very useful reply. File under “true but contextually irrelevant”.
> 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.
> 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?
The Stanford data set suffers from the same problems as the one in discussion: It opens up for correlating 'race' with foul behavior. Of course there may be such a correlation per se, just as there may be a correlation between heavy drinkers/medication abusers and excessive use of force. The problem with isolating the 'race' factor is that it promotes race hate, which is just stupid, when there are factors that are amendable ('race ' is not amendable). There is obviously a correlation between racism and inappropriate police work, but these kinds of data sets don't show that.
> 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.
Yes, data can be misinterpreted and abused. But you seem to throw out the possibility that data can be correctly interpreted to cast doubt on previously held notions. The prevailing belief is that white cops punish non-white suspects. Data frequently shows that this is either not the case, or is significantly more complicated (e.g. similar numbers of non-white cops being involved in incidents).
You're not in agreement. GP is saying that "racism" isn't a quantifiable metric, so you have to deduce it from data that include race. You're saying that it's not "racism" without officer intent, which is entirely semantic; data can still show racial discrimination.
Your pseudoscientific dismissal of racist policing makes me ashamed to be a part of this community.
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.
> Your pseudoscientific dismissal of racist policing
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.
Observe the sheer number of sound rebuttals to your statements.
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.
Sorry I don't buy that. I realize that race and racism are contentious topics, but we should really be able to discuss them rationally rooted in what is actually said, not based on assumptions, or by referring to number of objections etc.
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"
We know the "real reasons" from first principles - the people tasked with upholding the law have taken that as a license to flout it. Everything beyond that is a window dressing of politics, unfortunately necessary to rally outside pressure for these corrupt institutions to be reformed.
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.
Perhaps the individual who has been granted the right to violence will finally change their abusive and, for any normal person, illegal behaviour if they are finally outed.
This use of "race is a social construct" seems strange. When people say that, the key point is typically that it has no biological meaning. It's still often a highly relevant variable when studying social trends and public policy. The institution of a formal police force with its own sociopolitical identity and career prospects is also a social construct, after all.
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.
Just because race doesn't exist outside of social conventions doesn't mean it isn't a relevant factor. In fact, it's explicitly not irrelevant for things within our society, such as the conduct of our police force. For better (or in this case worse), race is a very relevant factor in our society currently.
You cannot simultaneously claim that racism is a social construct and it has no relevance in analyzing social behaviors. I doubt anyone here disagrees with you on the biological reality of race and how it has far more to do with social convention than anything else. But that _does not_ mean it can be discounted in this kind of analysis.
> 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.
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?
Agree racism in policing is a real and core issue. Racism in other walks of life is a real problem too, for example in journalism or social studies: i.e. when any kind of (un)ethical behavior is directly linked to 'race', either expressly or insidiously implied which was my point. The obfuscation that takes place here is that the cause of police violence is reduced down to 2 factors (race and individuals), at the expense of such things as actual racism, individual drug abuse, a propensity in police stations to pick that same sturdy officer for difficult and potentially dangerous situations, general militarization of the police, a culture steeped in violence, and a cultural tendency to see crime (any problem really) as something you solve by bombing it out of existence. Etc.
yeah this is not good. Being a police officer, putting your life on the line to protect citizens... the guy showing up at your place at 3 am to deal with a crazed meth addict neighbour next door.. doing this dangerous task for many years. To have armchair 'law enforcement' experts in each living room of the nation linking to an officers behaviour on twitter, not having the context of the case, the background and previous actions of the offender on file... seems like a recipe for misunderstanding. I do think those new axon body cams are a good idea though, a cop can not worry about getting skewered on public media if he has real time video proof of being provoked. Southland (Cop show) had a good episode clip of this .
Are you saying that cops are and should be thugs? I think police officers are better than that and should be held to a higher standard than that. There are plenty of good cops out there, but they are very much not advantaged by systems which protect the worst offenders, encourage silence, and discourage accountability. If you think cops are thugs then by all means, encourage a lack of accountability, and they'll become exactly that. Our communities should have higher standards, and the police themselves should have higher standards as well.
Of course. We all should be thankful there are people -- law enforcement included -- who will put their lives on the line to protect society.
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.
Yes that’s great . I don’t know how I came off as suggesting they should be thugs in the prev post . We should rather have a separate org, a police watchdog that has access to the footage and actively monitors rather than give public access to officers actions and personal info. That org should also have access to offender info and police info so they can interpret each case accordingly
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...