IMPROVE YOUR DATA

How to improve policing data

Your police department (or other law enforcement agency) may not have a publicly available Justice Navigator assessment, but you can still use policing data to understand disparities and drive the reimagination of public safety. The following questions focus on obtaining policing data and point to resources that can help you take further action to analyze that data. Other sections of the Justice Navigator, including “Take Action”, have more guidance on how to enact policy solutions once you’ve used data to shed light on public safety issues in your community.

Data collection practices vary widely, so you’ll first need to determine what data your department keeps and publishes. From there, you can identify what additional data you might need from your department, or what outside help you need to analyze the data you do find.

  • Gather any data your department releases publicly. Check your department’s website, any city or county-level open data portals, and the Police Data Initiative to find any data your department releases publicly.
  • Determine whether any data collection is mandatory at the state level. About half of states currently have laws requiring that local departments collect demographic data on stops. When advocating for stronger data collection practices, it can be useful to know what requirements, if any, your department is already required to meet.
  • Find demographic data. Understanding the size of different racial groups in your community is key to identifying whether there are racial disparities in police actions such as stops, searches, or use of force. Such demographic information about your community can be found in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data.

Although more and more police agencies are collecting data on stops, use of force incidents, and calls for service, they are often collecting data in a way that makes it difficult to do analysis with key information missing. Generally speaking, law enforcement agencies should collect data every single time a police officer stops or uses force on a member of the public, and every time a police officer responds to a call for service. Data should be stored in a spreadsheet or electronic database so that it can be easily analyzed, and it should be consistent and complete—meaning that the same information is filled out about every single encounter.

For a list of data on stops and data on use of force that should be collected, see our guidance to police departments, and for best practices in stop data collection, see our guidebook on stop data.

1

Record all stops

Every single one. Every single time. Stop records should clearly distinguish vehicle stops from pedestrian stops. If the department collects data on consent-based encounters such as witness interviews, these should be clearly distinguished from stops in which the person is not free to leave. Avoid using terms like “field interview” that could apply to either a stop or a consent-based encounter.

Police departments are not always aligned with their communities’ needs in the data they keep and share. That means that data is a public safety issue which often requires community attention and advocacy. Encourage your department to participate in the Justice Navigator, if they are not already. You can also ask your city council and/or state legislature to create data-keeping and transparency requirements that the department must meet. See “How to understand your local police department” for more information on how to connect with your department.

Once you have gotten data from your department, you can start using what you have to identify problems or reveal patterns. However, finding even simple statistics from police data can often be difficult because “key information is often spread out across multiple disorganized spreadsheets”. Also, getting maximum insight from a police administrative data set may require advanced data analysis. Finding a partner with data expertise, like an academic researcher (such as a university professor or graduate student), a non-profit organization, or a news organization can help you to get the most insight from your department’s data.

In addition to encouraging your department to participate in the Justice Navigator to receive assessments, you can also work directly with CPE to achieve change in your community.

JN assessments analyze stop data, use of force data, and computer aided dispatch data to provide insights on racial disparities in policing and identify opportunities to design more equitable public safety systems. However, many communities also have questions about other types of policing data, such as police complaint data and disciplinary data.

  • In some places, officer disciplinary records can be obtained by the public through public records requests. In Chicago, for example, the Invisible Institute has requested and published over 50,000 records of complaints against Chicago Police Department officers.
  • In other places, departments may be limited in their ability to disclose officer disciplinary data or complaint data due to state or local laws or union contracts.
  • If there are legal restrictions on the department’s ability to release data, you can ask your state or local government to lift or change those restrictions. In addition, you may be able to obtain aggregate (or high-level) data on police complaints even if you are unable to obtain data on specific incidents. For example, civilian oversight agencies often publish quarterly or annual reports that include aggregate statistics on the number of complaints received by the oversight agency and how those cases ended.

Most policing data collected is unfortunately not recorded in a federal database or standardized format, so it can be difficult to find a complete picture of national policing trends. However, several initiatives have collected national data on certain topics in policing:

  • There are several projects in journalism to track national police shootings and arrest-related deaths, including the Washington Post’s Fatal Force, the Guardian’s The Counted, and journalist D. Brian Burghart’s Fatal Encounters.
  • The Vera Institute of Justice has published tools on national-level arrest trends, police data transparency, and documenting the police budgets of major cities.
  • The Police Data Initiative publishes datasets from multiple cities on certain topics, such as calls for service and complaints.

Using data to identify and measure disparities and other issues in policing behaviors can be an important step in advocating for change in how public safety is delivered in your community. By providing numbers that show police harm against Black, Brown, and other marginalized communities and point to possible contributing factors, data are a piece of the puzzle that can answer the calls for change that have come from Black and Brown communities.

These resources can help you take further action to continue data-driven conversations and identify policy solutions to the issues you’ve revealed:

For questions or to submit feedback, contact justicenavigator@policingequity.org .

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