7 ms·

Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light

91 points by ericlucb1 10y ago

austincheney 10y ago
Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public. It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated violence. Is this the writer's bias?
- dibujante 10y ago
  Sounds like it. But the writer doesn't seem concerned with epistemic integrity. It's a neat project, though. Publishing use-of-force data seems like it's a sensible thing to do.
- maxander 10y ago
  Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for, given the context it exists in, is almost certainly to advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated. The writer furnished sufficient background to justify this inference, even if you're coming at this issue as a complete blank slate.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    > advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational. Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic. The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general. I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist). Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
    - vkou 10y ago
      When blacks are harassed, detained, arrested, and sentenced more frequently then whites, despite committing crime at a similar rate, why does it matter whether the cause is the colour of their skin, or their economic standing? Are you blaming this problem on black culture? Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
      - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        I disagree that it's a similar crime distribution per capita, on the whole. Of course, many of those "racial" or "cultural" differences disappear once you control for other factors, mostly economic. That being said, we still need to control for if we're using "black" as a proxy for "poor" before we call the police racist, for example. (That would be classist, not racist, policing.) > Are you blaming this problem on black culture? In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.) > Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go? Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin. I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents). So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
- dalke 10y ago
  As you say, it isn't. But the author doesn't say that that's what it's for. The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party collections, and now to government collection. The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable prediction, which was shown to be true. Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof. Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-birthdate-supreme-court-465185 http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-... says "Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks after the injection." Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?) In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting that data for that specific purpose. As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting. Booker writes, at https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-reducing-police-use-of-force-incidents-6adb41d72f9a https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-... : > Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how police and citizens interact and how they should interact. and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with people. That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The history of CA AB-71 is at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB71 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... . That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a systemic racial bias in police initiated violence. So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic racism.
Animats 10y ago
Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. The Washington Post has a database.[1] The Guardian has another one.[2] There's a site, "fatalencounters.org", trying to crowdsource this.[3] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [3] http://www.fatalencounters.org/ http://www.fatalencounters.org/
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. --- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-countrys-best-data-set-on-police-misconduct/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-coun... > When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson. > Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out. > The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest > The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014
Bartweiss 10y ago
An honest question: what's up with the use of the word "murder"? I'm not asking that to start a fight over whether these shootings were justified. I'm asking because that word has a specific criminal definition, and news organizations typically have very strict policies on implying criminal guilt (witness the pre-conviction use of "alleged X" even in the most obvious of cases). As I understand it, most of the names described here as "murdered by police" have not produced murder convictions or even murder charges against police officers. Without getting into subjective discussions of 'guilt', does TechCrunch have a policy on language in criminal cases? What is it?
- mc32 10y ago
  Well, TC is probably trying to carve itself out as an "edgy" news source" with edgy reporters, so they can play loosey goosey with language. And it's a shame because there definitely is an issue with police aggressiveness and violence and espousing a shoot first ask questions later philosophy for policing. On the other hand, we have too many people with guns who should not own guns. I'm ambivalent about the second amendment but so long as we have it, strictly test owners yearly and anyone possessing one illegally has to do massive community work and pay prohibitive fines.
  - cgore 10y ago
    Your argument in paragraph 2: the police are too violent and "shoot first and ask questions later". Your argument in paragraph 3: only the police should have guns. Umm ...?
    - mc32 10y ago
      No, only people who pass extensive psychological evaluations. Besides, is there excessive police violence on JP or UK?
      - codeddesign 10y ago
        Police don't even do this. If I am a gun owner and I want to go buy a new gun, I am under more strutany than a police officer who received his training and psych evaluations 20 years ago. Disallowing guns won't stop violence, but it will make for an easier police state. While I am not a gun owner, I do think it's a little amusing that a few bad people (comparative to population) have used guns for harm and now after centuries they are bad. No one had an outcry during the olympics rifle competition - so does that mean only "good people get guns"? It's a no win argument on both sides.
eth0up 10y ago
Below is a sloppy, incomplete, and unedited archive of authoritarian madness. While some of the websites are dubious, most events can be verified as having occurred (regardless of the perspective or source) and many of the websites are sufficiently credible. The much larger remainder of this list is not yet vetted and is omitted. I expect very few will take the time to look, but for those who do, it may thereafter become evident that something is terribly wrong. Again, there are a few random or unrelated links included, which will be removed when time or interest permits. https://justpaste.it/yzu0 https://justpaste.it/yzu0
jbmorgado 10y ago
> "Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public." Actually there is already data, and actually that data states that in fact, black people suffer more violence from part of the police, but LESS killings, is just there is a total bias by the media outlets that basically only show cases of police killings involving black victims and don't report the ones with white people. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...

91 points by ericlucb1 10y ago

Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public. It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated violence. Is this the writer's bias?

dibujante 10y ago
Sounds like it. But the writer doesn't seem concerned with epistemic integrity. It's a neat project, though. Publishing use-of-force data seems like it's a sensible thing to do.
maxander 10y ago
Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for, given the context it exists in, is almost certainly to advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated. The writer furnished sufficient background to justify this inference, even if you're coming at this issue as a complete blank slate.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  > advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational. Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic. The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general. I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist). Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
  - vkou 10y ago
    When blacks are harassed, detained, arrested, and sentenced more frequently then whites, despite committing crime at a similar rate, why does it matter whether the cause is the colour of their skin, or their economic standing? Are you blaming this problem on black culture? Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      I disagree that it's a similar crime distribution per capita, on the whole. Of course, many of those "racial" or "cultural" differences disappear once you control for other factors, mostly economic. That being said, we still need to control for if we're using "black" as a proxy for "poor" before we call the police racist, for example. (That would be classist, not racist, policing.) > Are you blaming this problem on black culture? In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.) > Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go? Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin. I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents). So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
dalke 10y ago
As you say, it isn't. But the author doesn't say that that's what it's for. The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party collections, and now to government collection. The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable prediction, which was shown to be true. Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof. Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-birthdate-supreme-court-465185 http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-... says "Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks after the injection." Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?) In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting that data for that specific purpose. As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting. Booker writes, at https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-reducing-police-use-of-force-incidents-6adb41d72f9a https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-... : > Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how police and citizens interact and how they should interact. and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with people. That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The history of CA AB-71 is at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB71 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... . That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a systemic racial bias in police initiated violence. So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic racism.

Animats 10y ago

Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. The Washington Post has a database.[1] The Guardian has another one.[2] There's a site, "fatalencounters.org", trying to crowdsource this.[3] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [3] http://www.fatalencounters.org/ http://www.fatalencounters.org/

fweespeech 10y ago
> Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. --- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-countrys-best-data-set-on-police-misconduct/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-coun... > When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson. > Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out. > The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest > The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014

Bartweiss 10y ago

An honest question: what's up with the use of the word "murder"? I'm not asking that to start a fight over whether these shootings were justified. I'm asking because that word has a specific criminal definition, and news organizations typically have very strict policies on implying criminal guilt (witness the pre-conviction use of "alleged X" even in the most obvious of cases). As I understand it, most of the names described here as "murdered by police" have not produced murder convictions or even murder charges against police officers. Without getting into subjective discussions of 'guilt', does TechCrunch have a policy on language in criminal cases? What is it?

mc32 10y ago
Well, TC is probably trying to carve itself out as an "edgy" news source" with edgy reporters, so they can play loosey goosey with language. And it's a shame because there definitely is an issue with police aggressiveness and violence and espousing a shoot first ask questions later philosophy for policing. On the other hand, we have too many people with guns who should not own guns. I'm ambivalent about the second amendment but so long as we have it, strictly test owners yearly and anyone possessing one illegally has to do massive community work and pay prohibitive fines.
- cgore 10y ago
  Your argument in paragraph 2: the police are too violent and "shoot first and ask questions later". Your argument in paragraph 3: only the police should have guns. Umm ...?
  - mc32 10y ago
    No, only people who pass extensive psychological evaluations. Besides, is there excessive police violence on JP or UK?
    - codeddesign 10y ago
      Police don't even do this. If I am a gun owner and I want to go buy a new gun, I am under more strutany than a police officer who received his training and psych evaluations 20 years ago. Disallowing guns won't stop violence, but it will make for an easier police state. While I am not a gun owner, I do think it's a little amusing that a few bad people (comparative to population) have used guns for harm and now after centuries they are bad. No one had an outcry during the olympics rifle competition - so does that mean only "good people get guns"? It's a no win argument on both sides.

eth0up 10y ago

Below is a sloppy, incomplete, and unedited archive of authoritarian madness. While some of the websites are dubious, most events can be verified as having occurred (regardless of the perspective or source) and many of the websites are sufficiently credible. The much larger remainder of this list is not yet vetted and is omitted. I expect very few will take the time to look, but for those who do, it may thereafter become evident that something is terribly wrong. Again, there are a few random or unrelated links included, which will be removed when time or interest permits. https://justpaste.it/yzu0 https://justpaste.it/yzu0

jbmorgado 10y ago

> "Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public." Actually there is already data, and actually that data states that in fact, black people suffer more violence from part of the police, but LESS killings, is just there is a total bias by the media outlets that basically only show cases of police killings involving black victims and don't report the ones with white people. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...