Though the issues brought up by this week’s George Floyd protests run deep, there is evidence that certain policy changes can lead to less violent police departments.
Cities across the U. S. have been rocked by nightly protests against police brutality following the May 25 killing of a Black Minneapolis man named George Floyd by a White police officer.
And as videos proliferate of police arresting or tear gassing seemingly peaceful protestors, the issues raised by the protestors seem more insurmountable than ever. But researchers and activists say that solutions are no mystery: Evidence-based changes to policy around policing can reduce deaths at the hands of the police. These steps alone can’t end racism overnight or erase the myriad inequalities in American society, but they can save lives.
Here’s what the science says on how to combat police bias and killings.1. Track the problem
There is no comprehensive government clearinghouse for data on police killings or police use of force. After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, several private and nonprofit groups began keeping their own databases. These include Mapping Police Violence, an effort led by data scientist and activist Samuel Sinyangwe, Fatal Encounters, a catalog by journalist D. Brian Burghart, and efforts like the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database.
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Thanks to databases like these, it’s clear that Black people are killed at a disproportionate rate by police officers, making up 24% of deaths despite being only 13% of the population, according to Mapping Police Violence. But the databases rely on media reports of deaths, not police department, city, state or government data, for the simple reason that many police departments are not forthcoming with this information.
“Data on policing is notoriously terrible,” said Casey Delehanty, a political scientist at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina. “It’s very spotty. It’s unreliable and often inaccurate, and this has really precluded a lot of study and understanding and also accountability in real-time of local, state and federal police.”
Even when the government does keep data, it’s incomplete and often held on laughably out-of-date technology. In the summer 2019, Delehanty embarked on an effort to get raw data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Database. The email provided by the FBI for researchers to request data bounced back. The phone number for researchers led to a phone tree that automatically hung up after Delehanty picked the academic option. He finally reached a person by using the field office’s media line, only to learn that the only way to get the data was by mail, on a CD (compact disk). After a few weeks of waiting, the CD arrived and Delehanty dug out a computer that still had a CD-ROM drive. The data was in an old, rarely-seen format (a fixed-width delimited text file) without the necessary file that would automatically define the data columns. It took days to define the columns by hand, Delehanty said.
Sometimes, incompetent data management by the government means that information just doesn’t exist. Edward Lawson, Jr., now a data analytics researcher for the state government of South Carolina, once tried to find out from the Defense Logistics Agency, part of the Department of Defense, how much military equipment was being sent to police departments around the country. He learned that prior to mid-2014, the agency had simply been updating each quarter’s information in the same document, erasing and rewriting whatever inventory had been transferred the previous quarter.
“Before the later part of 2014, there were no records that existed,” Lawson told Live Science.
Police department data should be accessible through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows citizens to request records from public agencies. But FOIA requests often come up empty, in many cases because police decide they simply do not want their department’s data scrutinized. On Twitter, one data scientist who used to work on police use-of-force research wrote that some departments are forthcoming. Others ignore requests, deny them summarily or ask for enormous fees — such as a deposit of $1 million — to release records.
Some state laws make transparency more difficult. For example, Section 50-a in New York state seals personnel records for police officers, keeping complaints or histories of misconduct secret.
2. Demilitarize
For decades, police departments have been gradually adopting more and more gear from the U. S. military. Departments get this gear in a variety of ways, but one common route is the 1033 program, which provides free surplus military gear to departments for the cost of shipping. Some of this gear is innocuous, Delahanty told Live Science — filing cabinets, gloves, binoculars and other run-of-the-mill supplies that departments would otherwise have to buy on their own. But departments have also received equipment such as grenade launchers, bayonets and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPS), which are military trucks designed to take blows from improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Both Delehanty and Lawson have found that police departments with more military equipment from the 1033 program kill more people.
