Toward a National Database of Officer-Involved Shootings

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POLICY ESSAY
MICRO-ECOLOGY OF DEADLY FORCE
Toward a National Database of
Officer-Involved Shootings
A Long and Winding Road
Georey P. Alpert
University of South Carolina, Griffith University
The plea to develop a national database on police use of (deadly) force or officer-
involved shootings (OIS) is not new, and Klinger, Rosenfeld, Isom, and Deckard
(2016, this issue) do a good job of tracing the history of the requests and responses
of practitioners, politicians, and researchers to the lack of information. Following their
discussion of the prior attempts to put a national database together, they remark that,
“In sum, the available data and prior research do not permit sound assessments of the
social determinants of the use of deadly force by the police, racial disparities in police
shootings, or the degree to which racial disparities may reflect biased or discriminatory
police behavior. Therefore, they cannot serve as a reliable guide for policy evaluation—a
pressing public priority in light of recent events.” By moving beyond the original request
for a simple national reporting of OIS, they accurately identify the needs and benefits of
such a reporting system. The purpose of this policy essay is to provide some background on
the dismal state of affairs related to our knowledge of OIS, trace the government’s attempts
to compensate for it, introduce the importance of the media, argue along with Klinger et al.
that such a database will improve our understanding, and take a giant step to assist in the
reduction of unnecessary or unreasonable OIS.
Many law enforcement agencies train their officers to be accountable and “own” each
round they fire. The strange case of the shooting of Miriam Carey by police in Washington,
DC, and Chief Cathy Lanier’s promise to have each officer explain the decision process of
firing each round is an interesting example (Montgomery, 2014). If the officers did explain
why each round was fired, the details were never released to the public. This OIS was
complicated, involved several jurisdictions, and was explained to be different and did not
Direct correspondence to Geoffrey P. Alpert, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of
South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 (e-mail: geoffa@mailbox.sc.edu).
DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12178 C2015 American Society of Criminology 237
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Policy Essay Micro-Ecology of Deadly Force
need to follow typical policies as there was a threat to national security. Regardless of the
reality, there remains a lot of information we do not know about this event, the officers, the
suspect, what was known, and the decisions to use deadly force. And this is one shooting,
in one district, with multiple agencies responding. What we have learned over the years is
that police agencies vary in their transparency concerning OIS (International Association
of Chiefs of Police [IACP] and Community-Oriented Policing Services [COPS], 2012). In
many jurisdictions, the agency collects proper and necessary information and uses it for
parallel criminal and administrative investigations. In other jurisdictions, neither the data
nor parallel investigations exist. It is indeed a sad state of affairs and demonstrates how
our fragmented system of policing in the United States works against our development of
knowledge and ability to improve our responses to potentially violent situations (Henriquez,
1999: 21).
What we have is a large number of agencies that do a good job of collecting and even
evaluating or sharing their data on OIS with researchers. These “worm’s eye view” studies
of OIS are critical and set the stage to develop a national database on OIS. As Klinger et al.
(2016) point out, if all agencies had similar capabilities, we would know a great deal more
about OIS than we do. Regretfully, even though many agencies collect and store detailed
information on their OIS, no single repository exists to examine patterns, trends, or even
anomalies. Klinger et al. accurately note that little is known about the social determinants
and racial disparities of OIS. They suggest their data are important for two reasons:
First, they are of substantive interest in their own right because they disclose
both individual and microspatial characteristics and correlates of police use of
deadly force in a large American city with a sizable number of officer-involved
shootings. Second, and equally important, we intend the study as an example
of the kind of data and research that can become widespread were a national
information system on the use of deadly force by the police to be established.
Klinger et al. (2016) are correct to place a high level of importance on their data and
analysis. However, as comprehensive as it is, their study does not introduce the phases of
the encounter (Binder and Scharf, 1980), tactical decisions, or suspect actions into the
model. One could argue that suspect behavior is a more critical variable in the prediction
or explanation of an OIS than racial or microspatial characteristics. Klinger et al. report
whether suspects in their study had weapons, but there is no information on other types
of actions or types or levels of resistance. Research on OIS has pointed to the importance
of the decisions of each actor during an encounter, and it has described the encounter as a
fluid, rapidly evolving event, in which each action is dependent on the perception of the
other person’s action or tactical decision (Scharf and Binder, 1983). At least these concerns
over microspatial and tactical issues are equally important. Although this line of research
on OIS dates back more than 25 years, we are still struggling for national data to analyze
the theories and questions that have been raised in studies that are limited to a few select
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agencies or research sites (McEwen, 1966). We remain in an embarrassing situation without
a national perspective on police use of deadly force or even use of force.
As a response to many of these criticisms, and to answer the basic questions, the federal
government has H.R. 1447 (Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013), which was signed
into law December 18, 2014; proposed are H.R. 5866 (National Statistics on Deadly Force
Transparency Act of 2014) and recently S. 1476 (Police Reporting Information, Data,
and Evidence Act of 2015), which if signed into law, together will help us understand
the circumstances in which citizens die in police custody or during the process of arrest.
Whether H.R. 5866 and S. 1476 will be signed into law, financed, or become another
unfunded mandate remains unknown. However, even if implemented, the actual nature
and scope of these reporting systems is not clear and agency compliance will be a major
challenge. Regardless of the attempts the federal government is making, it will be a long
time before any worthwhile data are available. To sum up our country’s current status on
the data, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James B. Comey admitted in a
February 2015 speech:
Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson late last summer, I asked my staff
to tell me how many people shot by police were African-American in this
country. I wanted to see trends. I wanted to see information. They couldn’t
give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault. Demographic data regarding officer-
involved shootings is not consistently reported to us through our Uniform
Crime Reporting Program. Because reporting is voluntary, our data is [sic]
incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.
I recently listened to a thoughtful big city police chief express his frustration
with that lack of reliable data. He said he didn’t know whether the Ferguson
police shot one person a week, one a year, or one a century, and that in the
absence of good data, “all we get are ideological thunderbolts, when what we
need are ideological agnostics who use information to try to solve problems.
(Comey, 2015: paras. 32–33 of “The Hard Truths” section)
He’s right.
The first step to understanding what is really going on in our communities and in our
country is to gather more and better data related to those we arrest, those we confront for
breaking the law and jeopardizing public safety, and those who confront us. “Data” seems
a dry and boring word, but without it, we cannot understand our world and make it better.
How can we address concerns about “use of force,” and how can we address concerns
about officer-involved shootings if we do not have a reliable grasp on the demographics and
circumstances of those incidents? We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze
data to see the true nature of what’s happening in all of our communities.
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The FBI tracks and publishes the number of “justifiable homicides” reported by police
departments. But, again, reporting by police departments is voluntary and not all depart-
ments participate. That means we cannot fully track the number of incidents in which force
is used by police, or against police, including nonfatal encounters, which are not reported
at all (Comey, 2015).
As noted, even if the government were to follow Director Comey’s (2015) requests and
require agencies to report data, it is questionable how compliance would be established and
how results would be audited. Without required compliance and financial incentives, it is
unlikely that the data from many law enforcement agencies would be received and if many
would be of sufficient quality to rely on.
Incredibly, our best data are generated by the media, which has become our na-
tional watchdog on police behavior, including use of force, deadly force, and pur-
suit driving. Several investigators have surveyed media reports of police behavior
and have reported that even deaths are significantly underreported by agencies. For
example, Thomas Frank from USA Today (2015) investigated police pursuits and
found the national statistics collected and reported by the National Highway Traf-
fic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to be incomplete. A website dedicated to OIS
and other police deaths (fatalencounters.org/) keeps track of officer-involved deaths,
and The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings) and
The Guardian (theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/thecounted-police-
killings-us-database) keep up-to-date data sets of police killings in the United States. Fortu-
nately, groups exist that are willing to invest in the collection, review, and dissemination of
these data. Unfortunately, the data are not verified, audited, or confirmed. It is difficult to
determine the role of social media and the ability of anyone with an Internet connection to
comment on an event or upload a video. We remain in an information vacuum concerning
the realities of OIS and the circumstances surrounding them.
The Value of Good Data
Multiple studies of OIS have been conducted using single or limited sites, and Klinger et al.
(2016) make excellent arguments to move beyond the worm’s eye view to the establishment
of a bird’s eye view of OIS. They note, “If we are to augment knowledge regarding police
use of deadly force, the following information, at a minimum, is needed: (a) the number
of incidents in which police officers discharge firearms at citizens; (b) the demographic
characteristics of the officers and citizens involved in each incident; (c) the agency/agencies
employing the involved officers and location of each incident; (d) the particular weapon(s)
used by police officers and citizens; and (e) the injuries, if any, suffered by officers and
citizens.” It is important to emphasize the word “minimum.” Maybe it is a researcher’s
delusion that agencies will collect more than the minimum or required amount of data. After
all, they are interested in administrative issues, not academic ones. That said, researchers
should emphasize to practitioners the importance of the phases of encounters that result in
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force and deadly force to assist policy makers, supervisors, and trainers, as well as the public,
to steer the dialogue to the important issues concerning OIS.
Many questions could be answered with proper data, including the importance of
agency size and location, types and frequency of training, and an array of other issues.
For example, we know the most about the actions of officers in large agencies that collect
and share their data, such as St. Louis. We assume that these agencies are involved in a
disproportionate number of OIS as violent crime rates are high and poverty is present.
Klinger et al. (2016) report that, “These results suggest that police use of deadly force is a
function of serious crime—firearm violence in particular. Race does matter but only in so
far as it increases the level of firearm violence and, even then, only to a point. . . . What
our analysis adds to prior research on the link between violent crime and police shootings
is the curvilinear form of the relationship, which is an important finding that warrants
further empirical investigation.” They make the plea to have their results replicated and to
find out whether other agencies or cities have similar experiences. With similar data from
other agencies, that comparative analysis would be possible and relatively easy to perform.
Other questions could also be answered. What if there is an inverse relationship between
size of the agency and the rate of OIS? Perhaps smaller agencies do not have the resources
to train as well or as often, and perhaps OIS rates are sensitive to training. A comparative
data set could help explain the police response to specific calls for service, the rate of OIS
involving unarmed citizens, and the influences of specific places, to list a few. The scope of
research is boundless, and it is only limited by the imagination and data. We need to move
beyond anecdotal stories, personal observations, and inferences to empirical comparative
assessments of OIS. It is a predicament that such a lack of meaningful accountability exists
to protect the civil liberties of consumers of police services while the government spends
aggressively to protect the American consumer from the free market. As a country, we keep
vital statistics on so many aspects of our lives and the world in which we live but not on the
highest level of government intrusion (President’s Task Force, 2015).1
References
Binder, Arnold and Peter Scharf. 1980. The violent police–citizen encounter. The ANNALS
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 452: 111–121.
Comey, James B. 2015. Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race [speech]. Retrieved October
3, 2015 from fbi.gov/news/speeches/hard-truths-law-enforcement-and-race.
Frank, Thomas. 2015. High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent by-
standers. USA Today. July 30. Retrieved October 3, 2015 from usatoday.com/
story/news/2015/07/30/police-pursuits-fatal-injuries/30187827/.
1. Some materials presented in this policy essay were included in the author’s testimony to the President’s
Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
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Henriquez, Mark. 1999. IACP National Database Project on police use of force. In (National
Institute of Justice, ed.), Use of Force by Police: Overview of National and Local Data.
Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.
International Association of Chiefs of Police [IACP] and Community-Oriented Policing
Services [COPS] Office. 2012. Emerging Use of Force Issues. Washington, DC: COPS
Office.
Klinger, David, Richard Rosenfeld, Daniel Isom, and Michael Deckard. 2016. Race, crime,
and the micro-ecology of deadly force. Criminology & Public Policy, 15: 193–222.
McEwen, Tom. 1966. National Data Collection on Police Use of Force. Washington, DC:
Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Institute of Justice.
Montgomery, David. 2014. How Miriam Carey’s U-turn at a White House check-
point led to her death. The Washington Post. November 26. Retrieved October 2,
2015 from washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam-careys-u-turn-at-a-
white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/.
Scharf, Peter and Arnold Binder. 1983. The Badge and the Bullet: Police Use of Deadly Force.
New York: Prager.
The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. 2015. Policy and Oversight: Tes-
timony of Geoffrey Alpert. Retrieved November 9, 2015 from cops.usdoj.gov/
pdf/taskforce/01-30-2015/Invited_Testimony_January_30.pdf.
Statutes Cited
Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 (2014).
National Statistics on Deadly Force Transparency Act of 2014, H.R. 5866 (2014).
Police Reporting Information, Data, and Evidence Act of 2015, S. 1476 (2015).
Geoffrey P. Alpert is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of
South Carolina and holds an appointment at the School of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He is currently a monitor for the
Federal Consent Decree with the New Orleans Police Department. He is a member of
the International Association of Chiefs of Police Research Advisory Council, and he has
been conducting empirical research on police and law enforcement agencies for more than
30 years.
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