California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force (seattletimes.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP: All 800 police departments in California must begin using a new online tool launched Thursday to report and help track every time officers use force that causes serious injuries... The tool, named URSUS for the bear on California's flag, includes fields for the race of those injured and the officers involved, how their interaction began and why force was deemed necessary.

"It's sort of like TurboTax for use-of-force incidents," said Justin Erlich, a special assistant attorney general overseeing the data collection and analysis. Departments must report the data under a new state law passed last November. Though some departments already tracked such data on their own, many did not... "As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force," California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a news release.
It's an open source tool developed by Bayes Impact, and California plans to share the code with other interested law enforcement agencies across the country. Only three other states currently require their police departments to track data about use-of-force incidents, "but their systems aren't digital, and in Colorado's case, only capture shootings."

Comments

And What Will Come of It?

[BrendaEM]

I don't think that collecting data is enough. Think of how many innocent people were killed by the police without being videoed. Our police are still allowed to be expert witnesses, in courts. I am sorry if this offends people, but there is nothing intrinsically different about police officers that makes them honest.

Re:And What Will Come of It?

[iCEBaLM]

What gets measured gets managed.

Re:And What Will Come of It?

[smooth wombat]

but there is nothing intrinsically different about police officers that makes them honest.

You mean other than their training? Compare what an officer is trained to see to a recent shooting in my area. The call came into 911 that a person, the son, had a knife to his mother's throat, had locked her in a bedroom and said he was going to kill her.

When the police arrived they found, oddly, the son with a knife to his mother's throat. After repeated commands to drop the knife an officer fired a single shot at the criminal who later died.

After all that, not only is the mother defending the son who just tried to kill her, claiming her son had no knife and complaining the police didn't have to shoot him, but the girl who called 911 saying her uncle had a knife to his mother's throat later said there was no knife.

Interestingly, the mother also said: "We had a little fight, argument like families have arguments." Apparently in their world pulling out knives and threatening to kill one's mother is what happens in every family during arguments.

Yup, just another day in the city where the police are always wrong even when they witness the crime.

Re:Now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to this time the police have relied on the "Blue Line", which is to say their claim to infallibility which is backed up by every officer in the force agreeing on whatever an officer says. If an officer says it was a gun and not a book, then they all say they saw a gun.

In the past they believed that the was necessary to keep the public giving them money and respect

Nowadays, people are more familiar with quality improvement and the need to identify errors in order to correct them. The see a bunch of people in an organization claim to be faultless is spurious, to catch them in repeated lies due to cell phone videos is completely invalidating

If we can have six sigma (one error in a million products) on every commercial product that we own, then why the fuck can these same methods not be applied to the police

Fuck their egos and sense of infallibility, they are just another product that we purchase and we deserve higher quality

Re:Bigger problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, where is the outrage over home mortgage schemes that kept black people from buying new homes in the suburbs and living in inner city tenements?

Where is the outrage over failures to force the owners of those tenements from removing lead pain and plumbing?

Where is the outrage over the abandonment of inner city school systems?

If you take any population of humans, expose them to lead for their entire lives and then fail to educate them or giver them gainful employment which offers a chance for a better life...

Then you would end up with slums that are filled with whatever group is oppressed and the other groups, which managed to avoid said fate, pointing the finger at them and calling them animals

much like you have

We need more

[Anonymous Coward]

Use of force tracking with detailed reports has been the standard in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for a long time, including written reports from all employees who have witnessed the use of force. But for police, much more has to be done. Body cameras must be used, with files uploaded to the report and the reports must be "bundled" and cross referenced to allow administrators and the public to identify bad cops.

Re:Well, that's a start.

[Uberbah]

Obey the instructions of the police officer and let your lawyer / attorney / barrister handle any disputes. The solution does not even require technology. Priceless.

And when the cop shoots you for following his "lawful orders"? How about when they shoot you before saying anything, like Tamir Rice or John Crawford?

No amount of authoritarian bootlicking will save your ass from a cop bent on shooting you.

Re:Well, that's a start.

[davester666]

Yeah. Hell, the ONLY reason these things are even making the news is because there is a/v evidence that it happened. But these things didn't just start happening now that portable video cameras are everywhere. They've been happening ALL ALONG, and the police have just been lying about it.