16 ms·

FBI director calls lack of data on police shootings "ridiculous," "embarrassing"

148 points by jsvine 11y ago

mtgx 11y ago
So why is it news to him?
- mhurron 11y ago
  I doubt it is. Either the FBI is just joining the ranks of groups asking for more Police transparency or the FBI director is trying not to look like a complete idiot by latching on to a cause no one can have an issue with to divert attention from the fact he keeps asking for encryption backdoors.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Let me see if I can channel the mindset. The basic premise is that the better nature of humanity is expressed when everyone works together through grand institutions rather than when they succumb to their tribal, factional, or selfish individualism. If you believe that premise--and it's a very common mindset among do-gooder government types like FBI or U.S. Attorneys, then encryption is bad because it facilitates subversive tribes or factions pursuing their own ends independent of the mainstream of society. But lack of police transparency is also bad because it undermines the public's faith in their institutions, which cripples the effectiveness of those institutions.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  haha, no doubt. "It's outrageous that we don't have some kind of investigative government agency that collects this sort of intelligence for the public good" -FBI Director.
cognivore 11y ago
If it turns out that there is a definite trend of increasing force used by law enforcement, I certainly don't expect them to release that data voluntarily. If it's not in their favor, they'll attempt to bury it.
6stringmerc 11y ago
"It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody." I'd say that's a pretty good example of the freedom of the press doing work that's in the interest of the public. Just because it makes the FBI look bad doesn't mean it lacks merit. Maybe his quote is taken out of context though, in that it's "unacceptable" the FBI can't fiddle with the data for its own ends.
- Ensorceled 11y ago
  Without any context at all, I don't take that as a attack on the freedom of the press. The only way to take it, without mental gymnastics, is that it's bad the FBI isn't collecting and providing that information and that we have to rely on a UK newspaper.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  He means it is a failure of the government that they do not collect and provide the information.
  - 6stringmerc 11y ago
    Well, in one interpretation yes, but saying that another entity collecting the data "benefits nobody" is really disingenuous.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      He clearly isn't saying that, he is not attacking the journalistic efforts, he isn't being disingenuous (at least not in the sense you imply, but he could be grandstanding for political gain rather than saying what he really thinks). He's using a figure of speech, the meaning is that the current situation where the best effort is coming from the journalists should not be allowed to continue, but there isn't any implication that they should stop what they are doing, it is an acknowledgement that the FBI or whoever should be leading the way.
matt4077 11y ago
Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread: Deaths by police in California: about 100 p.a. in Germany: 8 in 2014 Population: California: 39 Million Germany: 82 Million Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...
- hga 11y ago
  Without, oh, comparing crime rates that's useless. E.g. just starting with murder, with less than half the people California had 1,697 in 2014 and Germany 662 in 2011 per Wikipedia. I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
  - jeremysmyth 11y ago
    Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable. Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
    - 15155 11y ago
      Within the confines of our Constitution, which has been well-interpreted by the fine, honorable justices of our Supreme Court, how would you stop the violent, law-breaking gang member from getting firearms?
      - task_queue 11y ago
        It's better to not make any laws because someone might break them.
        k33n 11y ago
        It's better to not make any unenforceable laws because it's a delusional exercise in futility.
ThatGeoGuy 11y ago
> “We have a system currently that is almost entirely > reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,” > said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open > Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is > that they don’t lie.” Perhaps I'm being a bit contrarian, but numbers and statistics can lie more than you'd expect. Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly, and you can even skew the proper interpretation by carefully selecting certain statistics which support your viewpoint. I would be careful in saying that numbers cannot lie, or that they don't lie. Meaningful metrics don't lie, but this is not the same thing (and even then, how do we define meaningful?). I wish people would consider that it is perfectly possible to lie using math, especially so when the average person does not maintain an advanced understanding of statistics.
- Frondo 11y ago
  "Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly" -- Correct, and that's why there are people whose job it is to do so. I imagine the FBI, like any large organization, has at least a few of these people on the payroll. I don't imagine anyone who's enough of a data wonk to say something like ".. the beautiful thing about numbers .." is one of those untrained laymen. :)
- kbenson 11y ago
  Numbers don't lie. We lie as we try to make sense of the numbers and format them for display. At least when you have actual numbers underneath someone else can look and try to confirm or refute the prior presentation,or look for an entirely new meaning. Anecdote and popular sentiment to not allow this. It's not that having numbers means they can't be massaged to tell a specific story, but at least there's more than blind luck that goes into whether the conclusion makes sense.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    agreed, often you don't even need to massage too. If you collect some data without other data, you can almost logically derive an argument that wouldn't even be reasonable had other data been collected that puts it in perspective. So not only can you lie with data, complete data of a narrow query will lie to you even when you don't want it to.
debacle 11y ago
In small elections public sector workers share an unequal amount of the power with regards to political spending. This includes police workers. It is against the best interests of anyone seeking office to act against these unions, especially DAs. Thus, you get far less oversight than you should. People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now. Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Do you have numbers for that claim, about small elections and public sector union spending? I ask because I do follow local politics, and I not infrequently do see the public contribution lists. Local businesses and trade associations top the list, always, with the exception of the rare rich guy giving to some hard-right-leaning candidate.
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    Right, but local businesses want things like more parking on commercial streets, or lower property taxes. The things the police unions want are far more dangerous. Local businesses do not carry guns and are not charged with "keeping the peace".
  - debacle 11y ago
    I'm sorry, I had a big comment written up but Firefox ate it. The general gist was that exercising power is not the same thing as having the ability to exercise power, and that while money is power, not all power is money. I also tried to look up some numbers for my county but got distracted by an SQL injection vulnerability in my state's donation records archive.
cobookman 11y ago
Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged. If every gun has a unique id and is registered to a police member. We'd have very accurate data. Heck combine this with the video system. Might not stop the shootings, but it'd give us useful data to help prevent them going forwards.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  There was a system that apparently determines gunfire origin from triangulation reliably in cities too. Both combined sounds like power data (no pun intended).
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    I believe that system is called ShotSpotter. There are a couple drawbacks (coverage isn't perfect), and I've heard someone claim that it is nearing nanny-state levels of surveillance. I don't think the microphones are clear enough to get much more than a blur of noise, but I'm not sure.
  - jobu 11y ago
    A few years back I was in the Phoenix area for New Years eve, and the local police were using ShotSpotter. There's a tradition in parts of the city to fire shots into the air in celebration, but those bullets come back down and have killed a few people.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    Yep, they used these systems in Iraq and now they're setup in some of the more dangerous areas near me.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >> Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged There are already a myriad of procedures in place for dealing with weapons being discharged. You do realize its standard procedure in most states that if an officer discharges his weapon in any scenario other than department training or range practice its investigated by the department? This includes accidental discharges, warning shots, and shooting at animals and other scenarios. Also, the last time I checked with a buddy who's a cop, they have to check out and check in their firearms and ammunition. Any discrepancy between check out and check in, and a report has to be filed.
dade_ 11y ago
And intentional. After watching The Wire, I can't help but feel like the series never ended and that I now live in it. Check out Toronto, white police chief that supports carding people (mostly black) gets replaced by new black police chief who maintains the policy. Now the new mayor that replaced the crack addict is playing police chief. All will be confirmed once some trials wrap up: Sammy Yatim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim Marco Muzzo http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-says-marco-muzzos-jeep-fire-after-fatal-collision-was-out-of-the-norm/ http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-...
spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
One radical solution woudl be to merge all the little police departments into a single state police and have federal standards for reporting, training, fire arm handling.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I have mixed opinions about this idea; here in Scotland (population roughly that of Colorado) the police force was consolidated into a single national entity and since then there has been a number of serious problems (including the brief adoption of a policy of routinely carrying guns unnecessarily). But it does seem that there are too many little police departments in the US which are unaccountable. Or, worse, accountable only to racists.
- hga 11y ago
  It's sufficiently radical that I think it would be worth going to (civil) war over. It's an predicate to imposing anarcho-tyranny, where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn. This has happened in the U.K. and D.C. in recent memory. It's also hard to see how this would make the police any more accountable to the people.
  - debacle 11y ago
    I agree with you on the first point, but: > where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn. The NYPD has actually done this in NYC more than once in recent memory.
    - hga 11y ago
      I'll bet. One thing you notice about these events in recent history is that they happened to already disarmed people (NYC < 60K each long and handgun licenses, D.C. all aside from grandfathering, U.K. pretty much all except shotguns, plus effective self-defense has long been illegal), it's most effective that way.
  - 11y ago
danso 11y ago
For my class, I've put together as many resources I could find (at least, in a few days of research), including every direct-downloadable dataset from the various crowdsourcing efforts and official places and investigative projects: http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homicides/ http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homici... Counting police-officer-involved homicides is difficult -- but not more difficult than all the other things the FBI tries to count. That said, even if there were an official count, it's still very important that news orgs and independent groups also do their own count. Classifying these incidents gets significantly more difficult when you get into the details...but that's a problem common to every time we try to classify complicated information into a datapoint.
- jjxw 11y ago
  California also released a dashboard that covers arrests and the number killed by law enforcement which is based on data that is maintained by the CA Attorney General's Office: http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in recent years: http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement-the-case-of-california/ http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement...
  - danso 11y ago
    Thanks for the tip...just to let you know, if you are interested in "Death in Custody"...a journalist recently was successful in getting spreadsheets from the state of California that list each death in custody: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/california-deaths-custody-2013-2014/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/californi...
    - jjxw 11y ago
      Very cool, thanks for the link. I'm interested in seeing how well this matches up with the Attorney General's data if they are not from the same source.
ck2 11y ago
FBI director should be embarrassed that not one single FBI shooting was ever found to be in the wrong, not one, even when the suspect was unarmed. There's plenty of data on that.
- hga 11y ago
  Indeed; as far as we can tell, they executed one of the associates of the Tsarnaev brothers. Heck, we can go all the way back to Dillinger, they didn't give him a chance to surrender.
Simulacra 11y ago
If the director wanted data on police shootings he could get it. Calling it ridiculous and embarrassing is deflecting. They're the FBI, not some county police department.
- DanBC 11y ago
  How does the FBI compel police departments to gather and return the data?
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    The US federal government gives tons of grants / access to resources to local governments and PDs that could easily be made contingent on supplying data upstream.
  - beeboop 11y ago
    The FBI can compel ordinary people to hand over literally anything while also preventing them talking about it to anyone, including their lawyer(NSL). Pretty sure they can compel police departments to do hand over whatever they want.
  - Simulacra 11y ago
    When a person dies, particularly at the hand of a police officer, there is a corners report. There are police reports. If the FBI one statistics on the number of police shootings, they should go out and collect that data. It exists. If a police officer shoots someone, or has shot someone in the past 30 years, I think it will say so in a record somewhere. It's not going to say "Jimmy walked out of the liquor store and got shot and now he dead. Case closed."
- task_queue 11y ago
  The point is no one has been collecting the data for reasons, and short of using a time machine, the FBI will never see it.
hackuser 11y ago
If it's obviously ridiculous and embarassing, why is it just being addressed now? There is a deeper, systemic problem that created this situation.
joesmo 11y ago
"Mayors, police chiefs and state attorneys general said the lack of data is contributing to a dangerous trend in which police officers spurn aggressive tactics for fear of becoming the next officer to be caught on camera in a compromising situation." First of all, mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general are the ones who should be collecting this data and the ones intentionally not doing so, so they should have no say in this. We gave them a few decades (or hundred years, if you wish) to become transparent and they haven't. Second, I fail to see how spurning aggressive tactics is ever a negative. Police officers should spurn aggressive tactics whenever possible. If they're doing it out of fear of being caught on camera, they're doing it because they know that their aggressive tactics are wrong. So good riddance, if this is actually true (doubtful).
learning_still 11y ago
I have 2 really important things to say about this: 1. In 2013, the Los Angelos police department put more bullets into 1 man then the entire country of Germany shot during the entire year. Germany has twice the population of California and is roughly the same size. 2. For whatever reason, United States police are not required to keep a public record of how many shots are fired and how many people they've killed. This is not a common thing. It's pretty horrific. If they were to release such information we would see just how bad our police really are. And I don't mean bad as in evil, I just mean bad as in ineffective and out of control.
- eruditely 11y ago
  Germany is much more ethnically homogeneous.
- eruditely 11y ago
  Germany is much more ethnically homogeneous.
canow 11y ago
List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

148 points by jsvine 11y ago

mtgx 11y ago

So why is it news to him?

mhurron 11y ago
I doubt it is. Either the FBI is just joining the ranks of groups asking for more Police transparency or the FBI director is trying not to look like a complete idiot by latching on to a cause no one can have an issue with to divert attention from the fact he keeps asking for encryption backdoors.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Let me see if I can channel the mindset. The basic premise is that the better nature of humanity is expressed when everyone works together through grand institutions rather than when they succumb to their tribal, factional, or selfish individualism. If you believe that premise--and it's a very common mindset among do-gooder government types like FBI or U.S. Attorneys, then encryption is bad because it facilitates subversive tribes or factions pursuing their own ends independent of the mainstream of society. But lack of police transparency is also bad because it undermines the public's faith in their institutions, which cripples the effectiveness of those institutions.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
haha, no doubt. "It's outrageous that we don't have some kind of investigative government agency that collects this sort of intelligence for the public good" -FBI Director.

cognivore 11y ago

If it turns out that there is a definite trend of increasing force used by law enforcement, I certainly don't expect them to release that data voluntarily. If it's not in their favor, they'll attempt to bury it.

6stringmerc 11y ago

"It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody." I'd say that's a pretty good example of the freedom of the press doing work that's in the interest of the public. Just because it makes the FBI look bad doesn't mean it lacks merit. Maybe his quote is taken out of context though, in that it's "unacceptable" the FBI can't fiddle with the data for its own ends.

Ensorceled 11y ago
Without any context at all, I don't take that as a attack on the freedom of the press. The only way to take it, without mental gymnastics, is that it's bad the FBI isn't collecting and providing that information and that we have to rely on a UK newspaper.
maxerickson 11y ago
He means it is a failure of the government that they do not collect and provide the information.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Well, in one interpretation yes, but saying that another entity collecting the data "benefits nobody" is really disingenuous.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    He clearly isn't saying that, he is not attacking the journalistic efforts, he isn't being disingenuous (at least not in the sense you imply, but he could be grandstanding for political gain rather than saying what he really thinks). He's using a figure of speech, the meaning is that the current situation where the best effort is coming from the journalists should not be allowed to continue, but there isn't any implication that they should stop what they are doing, it is an acknowledgement that the FBI or whoever should be leading the way.

matt4077 11y ago

Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread: Deaths by police in California: about 100 p.a. in Germany: 8 in 2014 Population: California: 39 Million Germany: 82 Million Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...

hga 11y ago
Without, oh, comparing crime rates that's useless. E.g. just starting with murder, with less than half the people California had 1,697 in 2014 and Germany 662 in 2011 per Wikipedia. I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
- jeremysmyth 11y ago
  Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable. Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
  - 15155 11y ago
    Within the confines of our Constitution, which has been well-interpreted by the fine, honorable justices of our Supreme Court, how would you stop the violent, law-breaking gang member from getting firearms?
    - task_queue 11y ago
      It's better to not make any laws because someone might break them.
      - k33n 11y ago
        It's better to not make any unenforceable laws because it's a delusional exercise in futility.

ThatGeoGuy 11y ago

> “We have a system currently that is almost entirely > reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,” > said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open > Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is > that they don’t lie.” Perhaps I'm being a bit contrarian, but numbers and statistics can lie more than you'd expect. Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly, and you can even skew the proper interpretation by carefully selecting certain statistics which support your viewpoint. I would be careful in saying that numbers cannot lie, or that they don't lie. Meaningful metrics don't lie, but this is not the same thing (and even then, how do we define meaningful?). I wish people would consider that it is perfectly possible to lie using math, especially so when the average person does not maintain an advanced understanding of statistics.

Frondo 11y ago
"Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly" -- Correct, and that's why there are people whose job it is to do so. I imagine the FBI, like any large organization, has at least a few of these people on the payroll. I don't imagine anyone who's enough of a data wonk to say something like ".. the beautiful thing about numbers .." is one of those untrained laymen. :)
kbenson 11y ago
Numbers don't lie. We lie as we try to make sense of the numbers and format them for display. At least when you have actual numbers underneath someone else can look and try to confirm or refute the prior presentation,or look for an entirely new meaning. Anecdote and popular sentiment to not allow this. It's not that having numbers means they can't be massaged to tell a specific story, but at least there's more than blind luck that goes into whether the conclusion makes sense.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  agreed, often you don't even need to massage too. If you collect some data without other data, you can almost logically derive an argument that wouldn't even be reasonable had other data been collected that puts it in perspective. So not only can you lie with data, complete data of a narrow query will lie to you even when you don't want it to.

debacle 11y ago

In small elections public sector workers share an unequal amount of the power with regards to political spending. This includes police workers. It is against the best interests of anyone seeking office to act against these unions, especially DAs. Thus, you get far less oversight than you should. People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now. Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.

Frondo 11y ago
Do you have numbers for that claim, about small elections and public sector union spending? I ask because I do follow local politics, and I not infrequently do see the public contribution lists. Local businesses and trade associations top the list, always, with the exception of the rare rich guy giving to some hard-right-leaning candidate.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  Right, but local businesses want things like more parking on commercial streets, or lower property taxes. The things the police unions want are far more dangerous. Local businesses do not carry guns and are not charged with "keeping the peace".
- debacle 11y ago
  I'm sorry, I had a big comment written up but Firefox ate it. The general gist was that exercising power is not the same thing as having the ability to exercise power, and that while money is power, not all power is money. I also tried to look up some numbers for my county but got distracted by an SQL injection vulnerability in my state's donation records archive.

cobookman 11y ago

Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged. If every gun has a unique id and is registered to a police member. We'd have very accurate data. Heck combine this with the video system. Might not stop the shootings, but it'd give us useful data to help prevent them going forwards.

darkmighty 11y ago
There was a system that apparently determines gunfire origin from triangulation reliably in cities too. Both combined sounds like power data (no pun intended).
- jonlucc 11y ago
  I believe that system is called ShotSpotter. There are a couple drawbacks (coverage isn't perfect), and I've heard someone claim that it is nearing nanny-state levels of surveillance. I don't think the microphones are clear enough to get much more than a blur of noise, but I'm not sure.
- jobu 11y ago
  A few years back I was in the Phoenix area for New Years eve, and the local police were using ShotSpotter. There's a tradition in parts of the city to fire shots into the air in celebration, but those bullets come back down and have killed a few people.
- task_queue 11y ago
  Yep, they used these systems in Iraq and now they're setup in some of the more dangerous areas near me.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
>> Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged There are already a myriad of procedures in place for dealing with weapons being discharged. You do realize its standard procedure in most states that if an officer discharges his weapon in any scenario other than department training or range practice its investigated by the department? This includes accidental discharges, warning shots, and shooting at animals and other scenarios. Also, the last time I checked with a buddy who's a cop, they have to check out and check in their firearms and ammunition. Any discrepancy between check out and check in, and a report has to be filed.

dade_ 11y ago

And intentional. After watching The Wire, I can't help but feel like the series never ended and that I now live in it. Check out Toronto, white police chief that supports carding people (mostly black) gets replaced by new black police chief who maintains the policy. Now the new mayor that replaced the crack addict is playing police chief. All will be confirmed once some trials wrap up: Sammy Yatim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim Marco Muzzo http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-says-marco-muzzos-jeep-fire-after-fatal-collision-was-out-of-the-norm/ http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-...

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago

One radical solution woudl be to merge all the little police departments into a single state police and have federal standards for reporting, training, fire arm handling.

pjc50 11y ago
I have mixed opinions about this idea; here in Scotland (population roughly that of Colorado) the police force was consolidated into a single national entity and since then there has been a number of serious problems (including the brief adoption of a policy of routinely carrying guns unnecessarily). But it does seem that there are too many little police departments in the US which are unaccountable. Or, worse, accountable only to racists.
hga 11y ago
It's sufficiently radical that I think it would be worth going to (civil) war over. It's an predicate to imposing anarcho-tyranny, where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn. This has happened in the U.K. and D.C. in recent memory. It's also hard to see how this would make the police any more accountable to the people.
- debacle 11y ago
  I agree with you on the first point, but: > where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn. The NYPD has actually done this in NYC more than once in recent memory.
  - hga 11y ago
    I'll bet. One thing you notice about these events in recent history is that they happened to already disarmed people (NYC < 60K each long and handgun licenses, D.C. all aside from grandfathering, U.K. pretty much all except shotguns, plus effective self-defense has long been illegal), it's most effective that way.
- 11y ago

danso 11y ago

For my class, I've put together as many resources I could find (at least, in a few days of research), including every direct-downloadable dataset from the various crowdsourcing efforts and official places and investigative projects: http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homicides/ http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homici... Counting police-officer-involved homicides is difficult -- but not more difficult than all the other things the FBI tries to count. That said, even if there were an official count, it's still very important that news orgs and independent groups also do their own count. Classifying these incidents gets significantly more difficult when you get into the details...but that's a problem common to every time we try to classify complicated information into a datapoint.

jjxw 11y ago
California also released a dashboard that covers arrests and the number killed by law enforcement which is based on data that is maintained by the CA Attorney General's Office: http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in recent years: http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement-the-case-of-california/ http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement...
- danso 11y ago
  Thanks for the tip...just to let you know, if you are interested in "Death in Custody"...a journalist recently was successful in getting spreadsheets from the state of California that list each death in custody: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/california-deaths-custody-2013-2014/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/californi...
  - jjxw 11y ago
    Very cool, thanks for the link. I'm interested in seeing how well this matches up with the Attorney General's data if they are not from the same source.

ck2 11y ago

FBI director should be embarrassed that not one single FBI shooting was ever found to be in the wrong, not one, even when the suspect was unarmed. There's plenty of data on that.

hga 11y ago
Indeed; as far as we can tell, they executed one of the associates of the Tsarnaev brothers. Heck, we can go all the way back to Dillinger, they didn't give him a chance to surrender.

Simulacra 11y ago

If the director wanted data on police shootings he could get it. Calling it ridiculous and embarrassing is deflecting. They're the FBI, not some county police department.

DanBC 11y ago
How does the FBI compel police departments to gather and return the data?
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  The US federal government gives tons of grants / access to resources to local governments and PDs that could easily be made contingent on supplying data upstream.
- beeboop 11y ago
  The FBI can compel ordinary people to hand over literally anything while also preventing them talking about it to anyone, including their lawyer(NSL). Pretty sure they can compel police departments to do hand over whatever they want.
- Simulacra 11y ago
  When a person dies, particularly at the hand of a police officer, there is a corners report. There are police reports. If the FBI one statistics on the number of police shootings, they should go out and collect that data. It exists. If a police officer shoots someone, or has shot someone in the past 30 years, I think it will say so in a record somewhere. It's not going to say "Jimmy walked out of the liquor store and got shot and now he dead. Case closed."
task_queue 11y ago
The point is no one has been collecting the data for reasons, and short of using a time machine, the FBI will never see it.

hackuser 11y ago

If it's obviously ridiculous and embarassing, why is it just being addressed now? There is a deeper, systemic problem that created this situation.

joesmo 11y ago

"Mayors, police chiefs and state attorneys general said the lack of data is contributing to a dangerous trend in which police officers spurn aggressive tactics for fear of becoming the next officer to be caught on camera in a compromising situation." First of all, mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general are the ones who should be collecting this data and the ones intentionally not doing so, so they should have no say in this. We gave them a few decades (or hundred years, if you wish) to become transparent and they haven't. Second, I fail to see how spurning aggressive tactics is ever a negative. Police officers should spurn aggressive tactics whenever possible. If they're doing it out of fear of being caught on camera, they're doing it because they know that their aggressive tactics are wrong. So good riddance, if this is actually true (doubtful).

learning_still 11y ago

I have 2 really important things to say about this: 1. In 2013, the Los Angelos police department put more bullets into 1 man then the entire country of Germany shot during the entire year. Germany has twice the population of California and is roughly the same size. 2. For whatever reason, United States police are not required to keep a public record of how many shots are fired and how many people they've killed. This is not a common thing. It's pretty horrific. If they were to release such information we would see just how bad our police really are. And I don't mean bad as in evil, I just mean bad as in ineffective and out of control.

eruditely 11y ago
Germany is much more ethnically homogeneous.
eruditely 11y ago
Germany is much more ethnically homogeneous.

canow 11y ago

List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...