
FBI director calls lack of data on police shootings "ridiculous," "embarrassing" - jsvine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fbi-director-calls-lack-of-data-on-police-shootings-ridiculous-embarrassing/2015/10/07/c0ebaf7a-6d16-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html
======
danso
For my class, I've put together as many resources I could find (at least, in a
few days of research), including every direct-downloadable dataset from the
various crowdsourcing efforts and official places and investigative projects:

[http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-
homici...](http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homicides/)

Counting police-officer-involved homicides is difficult -- but not more
difficult than all the other things the FBI tries to count. That said, even if
there were an official count, it's still very important that news orgs and
independent groups also do their own count. Classifying these incidents gets
significantly more difficult when you get into the details...but that's a
problem common to every time we try to classify complicated information into a
datapoint.

~~~
jjxw
California also released a dashboard that covers arrests and the number killed
by law enforcement which is based on data that is maintained by the CA
Attorney General's Office:

[http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data](http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data)

I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported
homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in
recent years:

[http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-
enforcement...](http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement-
the-case-of-california/)

~~~
danso
Thanks for the tip...just to let you know, if you are interested in "Death in
Custody"...a journalist recently was successful in getting spreadsheets from
the state of California that list each death in custody:

[https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/californi...](https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/california-
deaths-custody-2013-2014/)

~~~
jjxw
Very cool, thanks for the link. I'm interested in seeing how well this matches
up with the Attorney General's data if they are not from the same source.

------
matt4077
Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread:

Deaths by police

in California: about 100 p.a.

in Germany: 8 in 2014

Population:

California: 39 Million

Germany: 82 Million

Source:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-
in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/)

~~~
saulrh
Let me plagiarize a reddit comment here:

America's LEOs may kill way people per capita, but our LEOs also _get killed
by_ people way more per capita. Even the most unhelpful lists of killings by
police officers have an overwhelmingly common trend: "Officers arrived.
Suspect drew gun. Suspect didn't drop gun when ordered to. Suspect pointed gun
at officers. Officers opened fire." There are dozens or hundreds of people
that are on killed-by-LEO lists only because they _shot second_.

Compare Canada to the US:
[http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go](http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go)
[https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014](https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014)

Similarly, if you look at Sweden's first-ever police killing from a few years
ago, the story isn't about police dying heroically because they're sacrificing
themselves rather than killing criminals. It's that they don't have to kill
anybody because nobody needs to be killed in order to defend others. "Violent
crime is almost non-existent there." No violent crime, no violent police. No
problem.

So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a
bad situation. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything, the
socioeconomic system that screws with poor people's minds, the macho culture
that drives gun nuttery and 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police'
sentiments, and violence in general. Until we get rid of those we're not going
to be able to fix the police because, for the most part, the police aren't
broken.

~~~
vectorjohn
We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it
could get some extremely significant limitations added.

People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get
rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil
society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and
you're not going to need it to protect your family.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any
criminal that wants one has one.

The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or
whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, _most criminals_ will have a
hard time finding guns. But _all_ law enforcement officers will still have
them.

~~~
bjt2n3904
Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?

"We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone.
Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors.

People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get
rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a
civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the
government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal
that wants one has one.

The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have
encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most
criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter
agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."

~~~
bdhe
> Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?

This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive
tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the
let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't
just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety
nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change
my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically.
Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.

~~~
nickff
Tight regulation of legal gun ownership and possession does not appear to lead
to reduced gun-related deaths, (based on a comparison between state Brady
Campaign score and gun deaths,) except perhaps suicide, though this is debated
.[1] What you worry about is of little import to anyone but yourself (,for
example, I am scared of getting hit in the head by coconuts, which are 10
times more deadly than sharks!), if you have a fact-based concern, we may be
able to address it.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-
state-gun-laws/)

~~~
bdhe
> if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it.

I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than
usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun
control discussion. It's barely even the beginning.

First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation.
Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical
level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and
guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people.

Second, from the article you cited:

> Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing
> factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate
> increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun
> restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so
> high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry
> licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield
> substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores
> differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you
> should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government
> actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything
> else, is devilishly difficult.

is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good
retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has
so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take
away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern
(viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related
deaths are not correlated to gun control.

------
joesmo
"Mayors, police chiefs and state attorneys general said the lack of data is
contributing to a dangerous trend in which police officers spurn aggressive
tactics for fear of becoming the next officer to be caught on camera in a
compromising situation."

First of all, mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general are the ones
who should be collecting this data and the ones intentionally not doing so, so
they should have no say in this. We gave them a few decades (or hundred years,
if you wish) to become transparent and they haven't.

Second, I fail to see how spurning aggressive tactics is ever a negative.
Police officers should spurn aggressive tactics whenever possible. If they're
doing it out of fear of being caught on camera, they're doing it because they
know that their aggressive tactics are wrong. So good riddance, if this is
actually true (doubtful).

------
debacle
In small elections public sector workers share an unequal amount of the power
with regards to political spending. This includes police workers.

It is against the best interests of anyone seeking office to act against these
unions, especially DAs. Thus, you get far less oversight than you should.

People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the
biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now.

Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.

~~~
Frondo
Do you have numbers for that claim, about small elections and public sector
union spending?

I ask because I do follow local politics, and I not infrequently do see the
public contribution lists.

Local businesses and trade associations top the list, always, with the
exception of the rare rich guy giving to some hard-right-leaning candidate.

~~~
debacle
I'm sorry, I had a big comment written up but Firefox ate it.

The general gist was that exercising power is not the same thing as having the
ability to exercise power, and that while money is power, not all power is
money.

I also tried to look up some numbers for my county but got distracted by an
SQL injection vulnerability in my state's donation records archive.

------
cognivore
If it turns out that there is a definite trend of increasing force used by law
enforcement, I certainly don't expect them to release that data voluntarily.
If it's not in their favor, they'll attempt to bury it.

------
dade_
And intentional. After watching The Wire, I can't help but feel like the
series never ended and that I now live in it. Check out Toronto, white police
chief that supports carding people (mostly black) gets replaced by new black
police chief who maintains the policy. Now the new mayor that replaced the
crack addict is playing police chief. All will be confirmed once some trials
wrap up: Sammy Yatim
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim)
Marco Muzzo [http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-
chief-...](http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-says-
marco-muzzos-jeep-fire-after-fatal-collision-was-out-of-the-norm/)

------
ThatGeoGuy
> “We have a system currently that is almost entirely

> reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,”

> said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open

> Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is

> that they don’t lie.”

Perhaps I'm being a bit contrarian, but numbers and statistics can lie more
than you'd expect. Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly, and you
can even skew the proper interpretation by carefully selecting certain
statistics which support your viewpoint.

I would be careful in saying that numbers cannot lie, or that they don't lie.
Meaningful metrics don't lie, but this is not the same thing (and even then,
how do we define meaningful?). I wish people would consider that it is
perfectly possible to lie using math, especially so when the average person
does not maintain an advanced understanding of statistics.

~~~
kbenson
Numbers don't lie. We lie as we try to make sense of the numbers and format
them for display. At least when you have actual numbers underneath someone
else can look and try to confirm or refute the prior presentation,or look for
an entirely new meaning. Anecdote and popular sentiment to not allow this.

It's not that having numbers means they can't be massaged to tell a specific
story, but at least there's more than blind luck that goes into whether the
conclusion makes sense.

~~~
danso
I completely agree. Case in point, look at the front pages two most prominent
examples of independent tracking of police shootings:

The Guardian's "The Counted" reports "891 people killed this year [by police
in the U.S.] - [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/0...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database)

The Washington Post reports: "758 people shot dead by police this year" \-
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-
shoot...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/)

The disparity is huge, but both sources could (and likely are, to the best of
their ability) be reporting the truth. But they both have different opinions
on what part of the issue should be prioritized.

I believe the WaPo has chosen its limited methodology (which would exclude
Freddie Gray, among others) for an understandable reason: police shootings are
hard enough to classify, nevermind all police killings. Read the Guardian's
methodology to see the pitfalls of their own approach:
[http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/0...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/about-the-counted)

The Dallas PD is one of the few agencies that is actually publishing their
officer-involved-incidents in a systematic, machine-readable way [1]...but if
you check their official homepage and read a few of the narrative documents
[2], you'll be able to see why things aren't cut and dry...and that how you
choose to count things has a very strong impact on the numbers you end up
with.

[1] [https://www.dallasopendata.com/api/views/4gmt-
jyx2?accessTyp...](https://www.dallasopendata.com/api/views/4gmt-
jyx2?accessType=DOWNLOAD)

[2]
[http://www.dallaspolice.net/ois/ois.html](http://www.dallaspolice.net/ois/ois.html)

------
learning_still
I have 2 really important things to say about this:

1\. In 2013, the Los Angelos police department put more bullets into 1 man
then the entire country of Germany shot during the entire year. Germany has
twice the population of California and is roughly the same size.

2\. For whatever reason, United States police are not required to keep a
public record of how many shots are fired and how many people they've killed.
This is not a common thing. It's pretty horrific. If they were to release such
information we would see just how bad our police really are. And I don't mean
bad as in evil, I just mean bad as in ineffective and out of control.

~~~
eruditely
Germany is much more ethnically homogeneous.

------
6stringmerc
_" It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from
the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters
between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody."_

I'd say that's a pretty good example of the freedom of the press doing work
that's in the interest of the public. Just because it makes the FBI look bad
doesn't mean it lacks merit. Maybe his quote is taken out of context though,
in that it's "unacceptable" the FBI can't fiddle with the data for its own
ends.

~~~
maxerickson
He means it is a failure of the government that they do not collect and
provide the information.

~~~
6stringmerc
Well, in one interpretation yes, but saying that another entity collecting the
data "benefits nobody" is really disingenuous.

~~~
maxerickson
He clearly isn't saying that, he is not attacking the journalistic efforts, he
isn't being disingenuous (at least not in the sense you imply, but he could be
grandstanding for political gain rather than saying what he really thinks).

He's using a figure of speech, the meaning is that the current situation where
the best effort is coming from the journalists should not be allowed to
continue, but there isn't any implication that they should stop what they are
doing, it is an acknowledgement that the FBI or whoever should be leading the
way.

~~~
6stringmerc
I'm not going to say the subtext I pointed out in an "other side of the coin"
tongue in cheek manner went over your head, but I'm also not not going to say
it.

I measure public statements by persons in similar positions to him by how they
could be cast as self-serving.

~~~
maxerickson
That you were being sarcastic seemed pretty likely, I continue not to be able
to make much sense of it (if the comment is self serving, it is as political
grandstanding, it is clearly not critical of the journalism).

------
ck2
FBI director should be embarrassed that not one single FBI shooting was ever
found to be in the wrong, not one, even when the suspect was unarmed.

There's plenty of data on that.

~~~
hga
Indeed; as far as we can tell, they executed one of the associates of the
Tsarnaev brothers. Heck, we can go all the way back to Dillinger, they didn't
give him a chance to surrender.

------
cobookman
Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which
uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is
discharged. If every gun has a unique id and is registered to a police member.
We'd have very accurate data.

Heck combine this with the video system. Might not stop the shootings, but
it'd give us useful data to help prevent them going forwards.

~~~
darkmighty
There was a system that apparently determines gunfire origin from
triangulation reliably in cities too. Both combined sounds like power data (no
pun intended).

~~~
jonlucc
I believe that system is called ShotSpotter. There are a couple drawbacks
(coverage isn't perfect), and I've heard someone claim that it is nearing
nanny-state levels of surveillance. I don't think the microphones are clear
enough to get much more than a blur of noise, but I'm not sure.

------
Simulacra
If the director wanted data on police shootings he could get it. Calling it
ridiculous and embarrassing is deflecting. They're the FBI, not some county
police department.

~~~
DanBC
How does the FBI compel police departments to gather and return the data?

~~~
fiatmoney
The US federal government gives tons of grants / access to resources to local
governments and PDs that could easily be made contingent on supplying data
upstream.

------
spacecowboy_lon
One radical solution woudl be to merge all the little police departments into
a single state police and have federal standards for reporting, training, fire
arm handling.

~~~
hga
It's sufficiently radical that I think it would be worth going to (civil) war
over. It's an predicate to imposing anarcho-tyranny, where people and areas
that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely
withdrawn. This has happened in the U.K. and D.C. in recent memory.

It's also hard to see how this would make the police any more accountable to
the people.

~~~
debacle
I agree with you on the first point, but:

> where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their
> police protection largely withdrawn.

The NYPD has actually done this in NYC more than once in recent memory.

~~~
hga
I'll bet.

One thing you notice about these events in recent history is that they
happened to already disarmed people (NYC < 60K each long and handgun licenses,
D.C. all aside from grandfathering, U.K. pretty much all except shotguns, plus
effective self-defense has long been illegal), it's most effective that way.

------
canow
List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States)

------
hackuser
If it's obviously ridiculous and embarassing, why is it just being addressed
now? There is a deeper, systemic problem that created this situation.

------
mtgx
So why is it news to him?

~~~
mhurron
I doubt it is. Either the FBI is just joining the ranks of groups asking for
more Police transparency or the FBI director is trying not to look like a
complete idiot by latching on to a cause no one can have an issue with to
divert attention from the fact he keeps asking for encryption backdoors.

~~~
rayiner
Let me see if I can channel the mindset. The basic premise is that the better
nature of humanity is expressed when everyone works together through grand
institutions rather than when they succumb to their tribal, factional, or
selfish individualism.

If you believe that premise--and it's a very common mindset among do-gooder
government types like FBI or U.S. Attorneys, then encryption is bad because it
facilitates subversive tribes or factions pursuing their own ends independent
of the mainstream of society. But lack of police transparency is also bad
because it undermines the public's faith in their institutions, which cripples
the effectiveness of those institutions.

