WASHINGTON - When the Justice Department surveyed police departments nationwide in 2013, officials included for the first time a series of questions about how often officers used force.
In the year since protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, set off a national discussion about policing, President Barack Obama and his top law enforcement officials have bemoaned the lack of clear answers to such questions. Without them, the racially and politically charged debate quickly descends into the unknowable.
The Justice Department survey had the potential to reveal whether officers were more likely to use force in diverse or homogeneous cities; in depressed areas or wealthy suburbs; and in cities or rural towns. Did the racial makeup of the police department matter? Did crime rates?
But when the data was issued last month, without a public announcement, the figures turned out to be almost useless. Nearly all departments said they kept track of their shootings, but in accounting for all uses of force, the figures varied widely.
Some cities included episodes in which officers punched suspects or threw them to the ground. Others did not. Some counted the use of less lethal weapons, such as beanbag guns. Others did not.
And many departments, including large ones such as those in New York, Houston, Baltimore and Detroit, either said they did not know how many times their officers had used force or simply refused to say. That made any meaningful analysis of the data impossible.
The report’s flaws highlight a challenge for the Obama administration, which has called for better data but has no authority to demand that police departments keep track of it. Those that do keep track are under no obligation to release it.
When the Justice Department’s civil rights investigators have scrutinized police departments and reviewed records that would not otherwise have been made public, they have found evidence of abuse.
In Seattle, investigators reviewed the police department’s reports on the use of force and found that one out of every five episodes was excessive. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, investigators concluded that most police shootings from 2009 to 2012 were unjustified. Such conclusions have been amplified by videos of deadly police interactions in Cincinnati and North Charleston, South Carolina, as well as on Staten Island, New York, and elsewhere.
But those investigations focus only on departments suspected of unconstitutional behavior. And police officers say the videos do not reflect the tens of millions of interactions that officers and civilians have each year. Federal estimates have concluded with “substantial confidence” that, when considered as a percentage of that overall number, officers use force very rarely.
The Obama administration is trying to enhance police training and improve relationships between officers and minorities. But without better data, it will be hard to know if those efforts are working - or even if use of force was objectively a problem in the first place.
“It’s a national embarrassment,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminology professor who often consults with the Justice Department on its studies. “Right now, all you know is what gets on YouTube.”
More than 20 years ago, Congress ordered the Justice Department to collect national data on excessive force by police. But as demonstrated by the recent survey’s inability to properly measure any use of force, that obligation has been virtually impossible to meet, in large part because of the difficulty of collecting reliable data from the nation’s roughly 18,000 state and local police departments.
Though many police departments long ago embraced sophisticated computer analysis for tracking and predicting crime patterns, they have been slower to do so when tracking police behavior. Of those
departments that require officers to document their use of force, some attach the information to police reports, some have separate databases and some keep the data on paper.
Among the large police departments in the Justice Department’s survey, slightly more than half said they documented each use of force individually. About one-fifth, however, said they documented them by the number of police reports that mentioned a use of force, which means that each episode might be recorded several times by different officers. About one-fifth of departments refused to say how they kept their data.
That is useful information, as is the data on what tactics are counted in each city, said KiDeuk Kim, a researcher with the Urban Institute, which conducted the police survey for the Justice Department. He conceded, however, that “they’re less willing to talk about how many incidents they had.”
In private discussions, some police leaders told the Justice Department that they were reluctant to turn over data that the department could use to vilify them, officials said.
In New York last year, the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, displayed bar graphs showing that officers were far less likely to use force than they were two decades ago. Yet when New York responded to the Justice Department survey, it said it did not know how many times the officers had used force.
That apparent contradiction is further evidence of different cities counting different things. The New York Police Department closely tracks how and when its officers use firearms, batons, pepper spray, stun guns and physical force while making arrests. The counting is different, however, for stop-and-frisk encounters, which are not considered arrests.
Any physical contact in those situations is recorded, said Stephen P. Davis, the police department’s chief spokesman. Police officers who break up fights or help control a mentally ill person might make only a note in their log books if the incidents did not end in arrest.
So when the Justice Department asked for a count of all use-of-force incidents, Davis said, the department could not comply.
“We have been, for a few months, trying to work on some way to centrally record when force is used in any manner,” he said. He said no decision had been made on whether to make that data public. But, he added, “I would imagine if it’s a number we can accurately grab and document, I don’t see any reason we wouldn’t make it available.”
Alpert, the criminologist, said the federal government would need to attach an incentive, or a requirement, if it wanted to get reliable information. For instance, he suggested making federal grant money for police departments contingent on their providing standardized data.
At the Justice Department, researchers are trying to develop a reliable way to count the number of people who die nationally in the course of arrest or in custody. Officials hope to have some data on the topic in the next 18 months. Collecting and publishing data on use of force in individual departments, officials said, is not a priority.
In May, a White House task force recommended that all police departments publish data on use of force. Rather than try to compel police departments to do that, the White House started a voluntary program that helps police departments publish and use their own data. The program is not specifically focused on use-of-force data, but Obama couched that aspect as a suggestion.
“Departments might track things like incidents of force,” he said at an appearance in Camden, New Jersey, “so that they can identify and handle problems that could otherwise escalate.”
Some departments already publish that information. And some are willing to do it but might not have the money or sufficient personnel to begin. The White House is focused, for now, on helping the departments that are already inclined to release data. The thinking is that, just as most police departments now voluntarily report their crime statistics, once a wide swath of departments make their use-of-force data available, others will follow suit.
