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In Knox’s study of the oversight of police organizations, a major challenge is “extremely incomplete” data. With the insights gained from data analytics, he and his team aim to ensure that officers who commit misconduct are investigated and disciplined for their actions, and that they represent and reflect the communities that they serve. Decisions to hire and deploy different kinds of officers lead to different kinds of enforcement behavior, said Knox. The absence of “gold-standard data and fine-grained instrumentation” are the challenges Knox, too, faces in tracking police conduct. “Essentially, all of the work that we do in triangulating and pulling together unconventional data sources is in trying to get around that problem in clever ways,” he said.

A high rate of police shootings relative to other departments of a similar size could be a sign that an agency’s officers need additional training, said Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at Princeton University. “Without this kind of data, it’s hard to have the foresight of which agencies are going to have a problem,” Kaplan said.

“The FBI is very clear that it doesn’t matter what the prosecutors think,” said Jacob Kaplan, a Princeton University criminologist and the chief data scientist at Research on Policing Reform and Accountability. “These are police statistics. If they think it’s a murder, then it’s a murder. Even if the prosecutor later says this isn’t a murder, like a prosecutor drops the charges, that doesn’t matter.”

If some racial or ethnic groups are stopped or detained by police at higher rates, this may lead to disparities in police use of force against them, even if this disparity is not detectable in the data on force used once those stops have occurred. In recognition of this methodological challenge, OIG reports on race- and ethnicity-based disparities in uses of force across multiple phases of police-civilian interactions, beginning with the initial stop.

Knox touched on a wide variety of studies his group has already conducted, including one that suggests with new, telling data that diversity reforms can improve police treatment in minority communities. He also hinted at the broader, innovative tools and research to come from his team, including their work building a national inventory of civilian oversight organizations; creating new methods for incorporating traffic sensors and red-light cameras to improve upon dark data; and the formation of a system that transforms body camera footage into structured data used to increase accountability.

Failing to account for events that don’t happen — police allowing a jaywalker to pass, opting not to make an arrest (usually for minor issues like possessing a small amount of drugs) or never firing a drawn gun — is problematic, says policing expert Dean Knox of the University of Pennsylvania.

“We all see injustice in the world and we all do what we can to address it,” Knox told Wharton News. “Pushing this research forward, and getting it into the hands of policymakers, is how I can help the most.”

One way to make sense of imperfect policing data is using causal inference – an increasingly important subfield of statistics. “The goal of causal inference is to understand the how and why that underlies what we can see,” said Knox. “Put differently, it aims to say whether things would have unfolded differently if we had done X instead of Y.”

While police departments and officers are tasked with solving a complicated social welfare problem, the structure of institutional incentives is relatively simple. The dominant incentives faced by police departments are to develop policies which provide indirect benefits—to make civilians feel safe and to see the police “doing something” about crime.

And it wasn’t just murder that went up in 2020, either. Aggravated assault — an assault that involved a weapon or seriously injured the victim — went up too, with assaults involving a gun driving a lot of the uptick.

The new system will provide an entirely new perspective on police-civilian interactions beyond traditional officer-generated reports, which the researchers hope will enable more effective supervision and accountability for misconduct.

Ba’s research is focused on the economics of crime and labor. He has always been interested in learning more about how the two intersect. “I realized that no one was focusing on the unintended consequences of policing, like what is the impact of arresting someone who was actually an innocent?” he said when he first came to Duke in 2018. “What kind of incentives do police officers have? What is the objective function of a police officer? And what are the consequences of these actions?”

Philadelphia will soon have a new police oversight body after City Council approved legislation Thursday to create a system that would replace an existing commission long criticized for lacking the power or funding to provide effective oversight.

“The findings confirmed why the PAC, and the PPD, believed this report was necessary-that the disciplinary process is in dire need of a transformative overhaul,” according to the report signed by PAC executive director Anthony Erace and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.

The goal of this Collaborative Reform was for the PPD to be transparent about its disciplinary process so the PAC could help pinpoint exactly which processes within the Department contribute to missed opportunities for accountability. For too long the community has asked for transparency, change, and a more equitable disciplinary process. This report highlights specifically how we can reimagine police discipline.

The PAC report’s findings, which reflect the pro-bono work of academics at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, are based on an analysis of more than 9,000 allegations from more than 3,500 civilian complaints filed against PPD officers over the five-year period.

“Existing empirical work in this area is producing a misleading portrait of evidence as to the severity of racial bias in police behavior,” the authors conclude. Such techniques “dramatically underestimate or conceal entirely the differential police violence faced by civilians of color.”

Among this year’s winning research topics: developing tools to analyze policing data, including large volumes of body-worn camera video, to monitor racial bias and suggest evidence-based reforms.

Those differences arose primarily because Black officers were less likely to stop and use force against Black civilians. Black officers also relied less on discretionary enforcement activities, like stopping people for “suspicious behavior,” and focused less on petty crimes, such as drug offenses. Black and white police officers’ arrest rates for violent crime were more comparable.

“We see two groups of officers going out, and they’re treating the same group of civilians differently,” Knox said. “It’s troubling.”

Likewise, while greater diversity among officers may start to mitigate chronic issues with enforcement, that alone won’t be enough to disrupt the carceral system’s devastating toll on Black and brown people. “No one policy is going to address the really serious concerns that we have about how policing is done in the US,” Mummolo said. “Our results do indicate that this can shrink some racial disparities in policing outcomes. But by no means does it erase them. “It’ll almost surely take a multi-pronged approach over a period of years to make big progress.”

“Sometimes errors are very nuanced or even debatable, and these disputes can exist in gray areas where it’s not clear who is right and who is wrong,” Mummolo said. “But sometimes, errors are very clear-cut, provable, and simple matters of logic, and as scientists we need to be able to tell the difference.”

If there is initial discrimination in who gets stopped in the first place, estimating racial disparities in how people are treated once they’ve been stopped becomes much more complicated—especially since police officers are more likely to stop Black and Hispanic people than white people, and more of those stops are unjustified. If Black people are stopped by police for lesser (or nonexistent) offenses, “equal treatment” in terms of the use of force would actually indicate deeply unequal policing overall. Being stopped by the police is “post-treatment” to race, and failing to account for this bias can lead to erroneous conclusions that may mask the extent of racism in American institutions.

Violations of citizens’ constitutional rights decreased 25-34 percent once police officers became aware their complaint history would become public, Ba said.

So here’s some advice for scientists and journals: If you’re thinking of publishing a paper on a controversial topic, don’t simply rely on your conventional review process—bring in a Red Team to probe for vulnerabilities.

The data we have pick up halfway through the encounter, after officer bias very likely has already exerted an effect.

“Who are the people deciding what an ‘optimal’ use of force is?” said Ba. “Are they the people who are experiencing brutality themselves? In almost all cases, no.”

Ba’s post tagged Uhlig and said, “I sat in your class in Winter 2014: (1) You talked about scheduling a class on MLK Day (2) You made fun of Dr. King and people honoring him (3) You sarcastically asked me in front of everyone whether I was offended.”

You know which version of Broken Windows really does appear to work? Fixing broken windows.

If America is serious about improving police behavior tomorrow, policy analysts need to know what police are doing today. We need the data, not just for some cities, but for all cities; not just for some years, but for all years. Republicans and Democrats should work together to impose a requirement that police agencies adopt a standard set of practices for recording data on the behavior of their officers and deposit that data regularly in a centralized public archive. These data should include the date, time, and location of police-citizen interactions, as well as enforcement outcomes and information on the use of force. The data should also be maintained indefinitely so analysts can measure changes over time. The scope of this effort is of a sufficient scale that it would likely require federal mandates and funding, but if better policing is the goal, open data is the first step.