8 ms·

How we built the largest database of police use of force in N.J. history

160 points by danso 8y ago

the-dude 8y ago
Confusing title. 'police force' -> 'police use of force'.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
True journalism. ACLU should do a nationwide one, they'd raise the money in a hearbeat.
- danso 8y ago
  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. [0] https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0 https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0 [1] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010337
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    > In 2011, the NYPD committed 685K stop-and-frisks. In 2017, they did 10K. Am I wrong to read this as "if we can't be racist about it we're just not going to do it as much"
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      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.
    - distant_hat 8y ago
      There'd be a massive backlash if they randomly started frisking white officegoers and the like.
    - twunde 8y ago
      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). 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-dept-stop-and-frisk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-... for more information
    - jmchuster 8y ago
      Why wouldn't you read it as "we eliminated 675k racially-motivated stop-and-frisks, and are left with 10k non-racially-motivated ones."
stareatgoats 8y ago
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.
- emilfihlman 8y ago
  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.
- abledon 8y ago
  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 .
  - catacombs 8y ago
    Are you a cop?
    - 8y ago
danso 8y ago
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] [0] https://invisible.institute/police-data/ https://invisible.institute/police-data/ [1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-shootings-data https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...
- forapurpose 8y ago
  Thanks. I'll add the Washington Post's database of police shootings throughout the U.S.: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police-shootings-2018/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
“Now that’s some fine reporting there, Lou...”
catacombs 8y ago
Great story. But, goddamn, this page is cancer on mobile.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rsync 8y ago
I wonder if this database contains height of officer ? I have this pet theory ...
- adjkant 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Also sperm count because of recreational pharmaceuticals causing disruption to the the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis...
tzs 8y ago
See also http://killedbypolice.net/ http://killedbypolice.net/ 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.
xbryanx 8y ago
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.
paddysanfran 8y ago
Enjoyed the read! Thanks for sharing
erinpetenko 8y ago
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 Proof: https://twitter.com/EPetenko/status/1069664096042270720 https://twitter.com/EPetenko/status/1069664096042270720

160 points by danso 8y ago

the-dude 8y ago

Confusing title. 'police force' -> 'police use of force'.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

True journalism. ACLU should do a nationwide one, they'd raise the money in a hearbeat.

danso 8y ago
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. [0] https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0 https://www.nyclu.org/en/nyclu-campaign-0 [1] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010337
- hanniabu 8y ago
  > In 2011, the NYPD committed 685K stop-and-frisks. In 2017, they did 10K. Am I wrong to read this as "if we can't be racist about it we're just not going to do it as much"
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    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.
  - distant_hat 8y ago
    There'd be a massive backlash if they randomly started frisking white officegoers and the like.
  - twunde 8y ago
    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). 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-dept-stop-and-frisk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/nyregion/new-york-police-... for more information
  - jmchuster 8y ago
    Why wouldn't you read it as "we eliminated 675k racially-motivated stop-and-frisks, and are left with 10k non-racially-motivated ones."

stareatgoats 8y ago

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.

emilfihlman 8y ago
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.
abledon 8y ago
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 .
- catacombs 8y ago
  Are you a cop?
  - 8y ago

danso 8y ago

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] [0] https://invisible.institute/police-data/ https://invisible.institute/police-data/ [1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-shootings-data https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jjpa/nonfatal-police-s...

forapurpose 8y ago
Thanks. I'll add the Washington Post's database of police shootings throughout the U.S.: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police-shootings-2018/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

“Now that’s some fine reporting there, Lou...”

catacombs 8y ago

Great story. But, goddamn, this page is cancer on mobile.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

rsync 8y ago

I wonder if this database contains height of officer ? I have this pet theory ...

adjkant 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
HarryHirsch 8y ago
Also sperm count because of recreational pharmaceuticals causing disruption to the the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis...

tzs 8y ago

See also http://killedbypolice.net/ http://killedbypolice.net/ 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.

xbryanx 8y ago

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.

paddysanfran 8y ago

Enjoyed the read! Thanks for sharing

erinpetenko 8y ago

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 Proof: https://twitter.com/EPetenko/status/1069664096042270720 https://twitter.com/EPetenko/status/1069664096042270720