Fort Worth needs this crucial element to understand police shootings, experts say
Local leaders, residents and activists have all called for one thing since a Fort Worth police officer killed a woman in her own home — change.
Since June, Fort Worth police have shot and killed six people, including 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson on Oct. 12. Jefferson, a black woman, was killed in her home by white police officer Aaron Dean when he shot her through a window from her back yard. Dean has since resigned from the Fort Worth Police Department and is charged with murder.
Jefferson’s family and their lawyer demanded a federal investigation into the Fort Worth Police Department and its use of force. City Manager David Cooke said the city will convene an outside group to review Fort Worth police policies. Some have called for the mayor and Cooke to resign.
But experts say change will not happen without one important element — data.
Fort Worth does not have a public database on fatal police shootings. While the police department posts reports on fatal shootings in accordance with Texas law, that information is not available on a public database.
Data on police shootings on a local and national level is integral to understanding why police shootings happen, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
“The reason why it’s so important to gather the data is not because data will let us diagnose every possible problem,” he said. “It can help us know when we need to look deeper and if there is — and why there is — a problem.”
Fort Worth Officer Sgt. Chris Daniels, a department spokesman, said the Fort Worth Police Department has no current plans to create a database, but he said he would mention the idea to the Professional Standards Divisions for consideration.
Fort Worth is not the only city without a police shooting database, but it is one of the few of its size.
Out of 12 cities of similar population size, Fort Worth was one of four that did not have an online database for police shootings, an analysis by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram found. El Paso; Washington, D.C.; and Columbus, Ohio, also did not have public databases showing how many times police shot residents.
And although Texas police departments must post basic reports on police shootings, many major cities, such as Dallas, Houston and Austin, still make databases available online. These databases provide important information on police shootings in a way that is easy to analyze and compare to other cities.
And that comparison of cities is important, said Franklin Zimring, University of California-Berkeley law professor and author of “When Police Kill.” To understand police shootings, researchers need to be able to look at data from as many cities as possible, and that requires uniform and consistent data.
A national trend in ‘crap data’
On a national level, gathering that consistent data on police shootings is difficult. Many times, the analysis of police shooting data comes from journalists. For example, The Washington Post published a database on fatal police shootings in 2015 that is regularly updated.
The lack of government-collected data on police use of force is a “dramatic and substantial failure in policy in this country,” Stoughton said.
“Not only do we have arguments about which pieces of data matter and why, we also have crap data,” Stoughton said. “The fact that we have to rely on The Washington Post or private media is embarrassing. Why aren’t we collecting those stats in a robust and official way?”
While the FBI has a database of police shootings, it is based on voluntary reporting from departments and is incomplete. The database also only includes fatal shootings — if an officer shoots someone but does not kill them, that does not make it into the data.
That’s also a problem, Stoughton said, because statistically, fatal shootings are quite rare, whereas nonfatal shootings are much more common. For example, in 2018, 992 people were killed by police.
“We’re talking about 1,000 lethal police shootings when there are 900,000 police officers, state, local and federal officers who are interacting with people on 60 million different occasions every year,” he said. “Inherently, police shootings are anomalous.”
Including nonfatal shootings in data gives researchers more information to work with in order to identify patterns in law enforcement’s use of force.
In 2015, former CIA director James Comey called the government’s lack of data on police shootings “embarrassing” and “ridiculous,” The Washington Post reported.
“If I ask you how many metric tons of shellfish did the U.S. export last year, you can find that in seconds on Google from an official government source,” Stoughton said. “But when I ask how many people were killed by police, how many times did police shoot at people without killing them, or hit them with a baton, we don’t have any good stats.”
Although gathering and analyzing police shooting data is difficult, it is incredibly important, said David Klinger, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
“We want to have some empirical data to help us understand what is going on in terms of use of deadly force,” Klinger said. “We’re sort of dancing around in the dark.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
