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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."
"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."
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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
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
Won't make a difference. The Guardian's investigation showed that even police forces that were supposed to record all police shootings didn't, and that includes fatal shootings.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
1. Really surprised that all violence against civilians isn't recorded, whether necessary or otherwise.
I don't think that it isn't recorded, rather I think this is more of a tool to make statistical gathering/reporting easier. Everything the police do that involves some kind of formal report is recorded somewhere in excruciating detail, but in the absence of something like this, I doubt there's any kind of detailed statistical gathering.
By excruciating, what I mean is this: I did a police ride along once, and everything that involves some kind of citation, no matter how small, invariably requires a solid minimum of 30 minutes worth of sitting at a computer and typing, detailing literally everything that the cop did, saw, heard, etc. The cop I did my ride along with didn't even like to give out speeding tickets because it's that much of a pain in the ass. In fact, we got called to help out some girl who drove the left side of her truck on top of a median and flattened both of her left tires, and I was in one of the two cars that responded. She technically broke the law, (I don't recall which one) but they weren't going to write a ticket. However she indicated that she wanted to make an insurance claim, and so the cops told her that if she wanted to make one they'd have to issue a citation, which would include points on her driver's license and a fine. Otherwise she could fix her tires on her own dime. She of course opted for the later, thus saving the cops involved a lot of paperwork (and time) so that they could respond to other calls.
And from my observation in all of this, the only time cops tend to issue citations for minor infractions is when they have a quota that they need to fill for promotion or other purposes (ticket quotas are banned in my state, by the way, except in Indian reservation where I've literally been issued a citation for going 2mph instead of a COMPLETE stop for a stop sign, aka a rolling stop) or if the cop has a chip on his shoulder and just wants to be a dick, or if they notice you doing something blatantly unsafe (like driving unreasonably faster or slower than the rest of traffic -- I drive 80mph all the time where the freeway is 65, and cops I've driven past never care because that's practically the same speed everybody else drives.)
Anyways, what I'm getting at, is that if there's violence or other injury caused by a cop, 99.999% chance there's a formal (and likely very detailed) report.
Or maybe you could stop being a racist shit. Black men use drugs at the same rate as white women, yet are 45 times more likely to serve time. Because of selective enforcement, which leads to a neat loop that took racists like yourself some time to perfect: minorities make up more of the convictions, so they are targeted more for arrest by cops. Which makes them more likely to be convicted...
It wasn't just cops backing each other up.
In the past, in cases where it was literally the cop's word against the defendant, the judges always assumed that the cop's testimony was more likely to be true.
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.
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.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
OK Barb, I see that your hatred of poor American's is deeply ingrained and that you will go to ridiculous lengths to defend your unwarranted position that lead contamination of inner city slums had a major impact on the people who live there, leading to furtherance of violence and poverty.
Just in case anybody else is interested in the overwhelming evidence counter to Barb's position can read any of these articles:
https://www.in.gov/isdh/files/Pb_behavior_problems_and_violence_fact_sheet.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/#1a63205b63b2
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbaum_muller_lead_crime.pdf
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/0900625/
And yet the US continued to practice slavery long after most of the western world made it illegal. You were even stupid enough to fight a civil war over it, that's how deeply it's ingrained in your culture. Just look at the fuss with the confederate flag - those attitudes are still alive today. The industrial revolution didn't make slavery economically nonviable - to the contrary, it increased demand for slaves because the machines could process more cotton, and only the slaves could pick it.
It only died out in the southern states because the northern states were emancipating slaves that made it north. The loss of cheap labor, not the industrial revolution, was why it died out. If they could have continued to replace slaves as fast as they ran away, or put up exit controls, the southern states would have had no problem, and would probably have won the civil war.
People still wore clothes even during the industrial revolution. Someone had to pick that cotton. It wasn't machines.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Easy, if it does more than (2d8+1) 17 damage, then it would be a critical injury.
Of your three cases, the officer in the first is facing criminal charges with up to 20 years in jail. Obviously the system works.
The second two were running around in public with realistic looking guns, and didn't quickly do what the officers ordered... Are you suggesting that people should be able to point fake guns at cops with no repercussions? Too many officers get killed on the job, already. Requiring psychic abilities in use of force decisions will make that number sky rocket.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Racist projection and hand waving noted. Cops are quite happy to screw over or murder innocent white people as well - just ask Michael Morton, Kelly Thomas and Cameron Todd Willingham.