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:<p><a href="http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homicides/" rel="nofollow">http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homici...</a><p>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.
Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread:<p>Deaths by police<p>in California: about 100 p.a.<p>in Germany: 8 in 2014<p>Population:<p>California: 39 Million<p>Germany: 82 Million<p>Source: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...</a>
"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."<p>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.<p>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).
In small elections public sector workers share an unequal amount of the power with regards to political spending. This includes police workers.<p>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.<p>People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now.<p>Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.
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.
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
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim</a>
Marco Muzzo
<a href="http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-says-marco-muzzos-jeep-fire-after-fatal-collision-was-out-of-the-norm/" rel="nofollow">http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-...</a>
> “We have a system currently that is almost entirely<p>> reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,”<p>> said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open<p>> Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is<p>> that they don’t lie.”<p>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.<p>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.
I have 2 really important things to say about this:<p>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.<p>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.
<i>"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><p>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.
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.<p>There's plenty of data on that.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...</a>
If it's obviously ridiculous and embarassing, why is it just being addressed now? There is a deeper, systemic problem that created this situation.