Another of the dirty little secrets of policing in America is the underreporting by police departments — in many instances on a vast scale — of crimes committed within a jurisdiction. One of the primary reasons has to do with property values: The more crimes reported in a city, town or village, the less desirable those locales are perceived to be, thus lowering property values.
By way of example, when the alarm bell was recently rung regarding the increasing number of heroin overdoses in suburban Cuyahoga County, some residents of tony, upscale communities such as Chagrin Falls and Westlake loudly protested that the reports of deaths from the coroner’s office involving their towns simply had to be mistakes … such things couldn’t happen in their areas, but, alas, the figures were accurate. And without accurate statistics combating the problem is made that much more difficult.
This underreporting phenomenon is also prevalent when it comes to determining how many individuals in America die at the hands of cops. Quite logically, if the number of deaths is underreported, those who resist change can ask, “what’s the problem, the number really isn’t all that large,” knowing full-well they are being disingenuous.
In an article for The Salt Lake Tribune, writer Erin Alberty states that “… nobody can say whether deadly force is actually on the rise — or measure, beyond individual departments, whether a given policy change reduces fatal encounters with law enforcement. That’s because, bottom line, no one knows how many people are shot by police.”
While numerous federal agencies collect crime statistics — the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Criminal Justice Statistics are two of the most recognized and trusted — overall, the collecting of data on police shootings has been woefully inadequate … producing inaccurate statistical results. There’s a strong suspicion that some folks would rather not know the truth.
“The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report gathers nationwide crime statistics from more than 18,000 police agencies, representing 98 percent of the U.S. population. But police agencies often do not submit the supplementary information that shows the number of people killed by police in justifiable homicides. Most Utah agencies did not report officer-involved homicides, and those agencies that did vastly underreported them,” writes Alberty.
By way of example, Alberty found that while Utah police agencies reported 18 justifiable homicides by law enforcement from 2007 to 2012 (the latest period for which FBI statistics were available) the Salt Lake Tribune “identified 59 homicides by law enforcement officers, deemed justified by prosecutors, during that time period.”
Alberty states that her findings of underreporting are borne out by other reviews of FBI data. The Wall Street Journal recently gathered internal data on homicides by police during the same time period from 105 of the nation’s largest departments and found that more than 500 of at least 1,800 police killings were missing from the FBI tally.
In 2003, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) called on states to report use-of-force fatalities as part of its “Arrest-Related Deaths” program, but when an audit found too many deaths missing in the BJS national data, the program was discontinued, said Andrea Burch, a statistician for the U.S. Department of Justice. No data after 2009 will be available.
“It is the most awesome power that the state possesses,” said David Klinger, professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “For citizens not to know how often the state kills them, or shoots them and they survive, or shoots and misses — how are we supposed to monitor and judge the appropriateness of the conduct of state agents if we don’t know how often they do something?”
A private citizen, Jim Fisher has done more to shed light on the subject than any governmental agency and his work is widely renowned as being first rate. His findings indeed are an interesting read, and one of his findings supports the idea that consent decrees do work. His statistics show a startling decline in the number of police shootings in New Orleans after the feds forced reorganization on that department.
Following Fisher’s lead, the website Deadspin.com (which is more widely known for reporting on sports) is attempting to recruit ordinary, everyday citizens into an effort to track and report police shootings in their communities to its lead person on this very necessary and worthwhile effort: kyle@deadspin.com. They are stressing honesty and accuracy in the reporting. When individual citizens ask what can they do to help, this is one potentially powerful answer.
The chart above, comparing statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all show an increase in police shootings since 2008, with BJS and NVSS showing a startling rise in such incidents that, for some reason, show an amazing correlation with Barack Obama ascendancy to the presidency.
Here are Deadspin’s guidelines:
— Using Google’s search tools, isolate a single day (e.g. Jan. 1, 2011, to Jan. 1, 2011) and search for the term “police involved shooting” (don’t use quotation marks). Use Chrome’s Incognito mode when searching to ensure you aren’t getting local results.
— Read each link on the first 10 pages of results; for any instances of shootings involving a police officer, log them in the spreadsheet.
— We’re looking at 2011, 2012, and 2013, and tracking date, name, age, gender, race/ethnicity, injured/killed, armed/unarmed, city, county, state, agency, number of shots, a brief summary, and a link to a story about the incident are to be filled out as best as possible given the information in all stories about the incident.
— Before starting in, take a look at the submissions here and pick a day that no one has begun. Remember, we’re starting off looking at just the past three years.
— Often, the first day of reports will not have personal details, and a second search of subsequent days will fill in more of the story.
— A later death, after a person is hospitalized in a police-involved shooting, is considered a death for our purposes.
— We are looking for any incidence of a police officer shooting and hitting another person.
— We are not looking for incidences of police officers discharging their weapons and hitting no one. In a perfect world these would be tracked, since often the only difference is that the shot missed, but these incidents are not as thoroughly reported and would probably bias the data.
Please keep the data as neat as possible. Work within specific months, make sure you’re in the correct year, keep the columns clean and add peripheral information in the Summary portion, etc. We’re making this fully public, and anyone can jump in and lend a hand. This is a trial—we’d love it if this turned out well, but if it doesn’t, we’re prepared to complete it on our own, or with more targeted assistance. But we think this is a necessary thing, and we trust you all to not be dicks in there. Obviously, if you have a better idea for how to gather this data, or have access to an already-compiled set, let us know.
Now everyone who wants to impact on the problem of how policing is carried out in America has a way to do so — no more excuses.
[Photo: Pete (Flickr)]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.