LOS ANGELES, CA — The Guardian this past week reported that Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched policedata.org, “cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.”
Fewer than 40 percent of use-of-force incidents originated with reports of violence or involved a violent crime charge, said MPV, arguing it “mirrors patterns for lethal force, with data suggesting the majority of people killed by police are not accused of violent or serious crimes.”
“We have a relentless system that has been reproducing these extremely violent outcomes year after year,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, founder of Mapping Police Violence.
“The approach that cities and states took to reduce use of force after George Floyd’s murder was just not aligned to the severity of the problem. The overall goal of making communities safer from police violence has not been achieved,” Sinyangwe added.
This database, according to Sam Levin from The Guardian, features “incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state.”
Mapping Police Violence suggested the following findings reveal that “despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.”
“In the absence of a national tracking system for use of force,” Levin wrote, “it obtained data on use-of-force incidents from more than 2,800 agencies, covering nearly 60 percent of the population, and got six full years of data from 634 of those departments.”
MPV was reported to calculate average rates of force by population to get its national estimates. The data is considered an “undercount” as it only covers “incidents disclosed by officers and agencies, and many states have laws restricting access to police files.”
Based on past reports, data revealed that U.S. police kill roughly 1,200 people each year, or three people a day.
It is a “death toll that has crept up every year and dramatically exceeds rates in comparable nations,” Levin warned. “The nonfatal force statistics and accompanying report illustrate how the killings are just a small fraction of broader police violence and injuries caused by law enforcement.”
“The overall scale of the use of nonfatal force is just a different order of magnitude than deadly force,” said Sinyangwe. “It is even more disproportionately Black and more disproportionately unarmed and involved in nonviolent situations. All the inequities we’ve identified about police deadly force appear to be even more extreme in the context of overall police force.”
Levin listed other key findings from the monumental report compiled since 2022.
“There were 1.2 uses of force reported for every 1,000 residents. The most common use of force was stun guns, which are considered ‘less-lethal’ but can also have deadly consequences…The organization tracked more than 20,000 stun gun deployments…cataloged more than 8,000 incidents of chemicals being sprayed; more than 4,700 cases of people hit by weapons like batons and beanbags; and more than 2,100 cases of contacts with K9 dogs,” said Levin.
“There are an additional 200,000 cases in which officers threaten force… with the 300,000 use-of-force cases each year, the Guardian added, noting, “83 percent of people subjected to force across those jurisdictions were unarmed.”
The Guardian also reported fewer than 40 percent of use-of-force incidents originated with reports of violence or involved a violent crime charge, Black people were subject to overall police use of force at a rate 3.2 times greater than white people in 2022, Black people were killed by police at 2.6 times the rate of white people in 2022, for the eight agencies that disclosed housing status, 11 to 44 percent of people subject to force were listed as unhoused.”
Half of the agencies, according to The Guardian, reported an increase in force since 2020, with “fewer than one in six agencies reported significant reductions in use of force” and the data coming “from 727 agencies that disclosed at least five years of data, comparing 2018-2019 rates to 2021-2022 rates.”
“There is a lack of broad accountability,” said Salimah Hankins, adviser to and former director of the United Nations Anti Racism Coalition, which toured cities across the US to document systemic racism in the criminal legal system last year.
The group, according to The Guardian, identified “impunity” for police killings, which are rarely prosecuted, as a barrier to reforms. “If you have no real accountability, then why would there be the will to change this?”
Jurisdictions that increased police budgets were more likely to see increases in use of force, the report found.
Levin also made the connection that there were also higher rates of force in agencies with higher arrest rates for low-level offenses, further suggesting that “departments that aggressively enforce minor infractions could be more likely to attack or injure civilians.”
Hankins added the political climate has continued to favor the status quo of law enforcement operations.
Hankins added, “We’re in a cycle where the pendulum swings back and forth – 2020 created a heightened awareness, and that awareness is still there. But I do think we’re in a backlash. And it is politically expedient for candidates to be seen as ‘tough-on-crime, law-and-order’ in a way that does throw poor people, Black and brown people, people with disabilities under the bus.”
Despite signs of isolated reductions in police violence, with 757 agencies disclosing that 973 neck restraint uses in 2019 experienced a nearly 90 percent drop with 112 of those cases.
“It shows that policy can make a difference, but overall use of force didn’t change,” Sinyangwe said, highlighting reductions in that specific tactic did not translate to broader declines in police force and killings.
Sinyangwe added policies that reduce overall police encounters can be most effective at reducing injuries and killings by police, such as alternative responder programs dispatching mental health professionals to people in crisis.
Ultimately, Sinyangwe said he hoped his database would not only “see an expansion of initiatives shown to work,” but also would help officials, “including a potential Kamala Harris administration, identify agencies in need of urgent intervention,” according to Levin.
