USC professor, others decry lack of reliable information when police shoot in the line of duty

It’s a national embarrassment that no one knows exactly how often police fire at or kill suspects in the United States, and the lack of sufficient information makes it harder to grapple with the controversial issue, a USC criminal justice professor said.

“The government is very aggressive about giving us numbers to protect us from the free market,” the University of South Carolina’s Geoff Alpert, a nationally recognized expert on police use of force issues, said in an interview. “But not much when it comes to our civil liberties.

“For 20 years, we’ve been trying to get the government to do something,” Alpert said. “We don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on in the use of lethal force. Are young black males being shot at a rate disproportionate to their involvement in crime? Is this an aberration, a trend, routine, something going on for a long time? We don’t know.”

Researchers and criminologists across the nation complain of inaccurate, incomplete and disjointed data that paint partial pictures of life-changing uses of government power.

Alpert took his concerns in January to a U.S Justice Department presidential task force on 21st century policing.

“It really is a national embarrassment that we do not have a clear picture of police use of force or deadly force,” Alpert said at a University of Cincinnati “listening session” on police policies and oversight.

“There are many studies that use single or multiple agency data – giving us a worm’s eye view,” he told the panel. “While many agencies collect information, . . . no single repository exists to examine patterns, trends or even anomalies. We need to move beyond anecdotal to empirical.”

Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor, also decries the lack of reliable data.

“There is a long list of important research questions – not arcane ones, or of mere interest to the academic research community – that we currently cannot study or systematically analyze because there is no data,” Rosenfeld told The New York Times last summer.

South Carolina, like most states, has no central location where all officer-involved shooting cases are housed or analyzed beyond determining on a case-by-case basis whether police acted legally when they pulled the trigger in the line of duty.

The State Law Enforcement Division investigates almost all shootings, but only at the invitation of local or other state police agencies – SLED has no authority to take over an investigation and local police are not required by law to report such shootings.

SLED’s thick investigative case files often, as a matter of practice, do not contain the race of the officers, for example, though the officer’s statement is part of the file. Other details about each shooting must be gleaned from hundreds of pages of documents, some of which are removed because of state privacy laws. And, of course, the public may gain access to case files only after local prosecutors make final determinations as to whether officers fired within their legal discretion.

South Carolina’s neighbors have no better system for keeping track of cases.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigations keep up with the number of shooting cases they are invited to investigate. SBI routinely tracks the number of deaths only. GBI tracks only the number of incidents. A more detailed analysis in both states requires pulling each investigative case file, spokeswomen for the agencies said.

Only recently has SLED begun tracking trends that include crimes that lead to shootings, the weapons wielded by suspects as well as gender and race of suspects and frequency of fatalities. But that information is neither complete nor widely shared publicly.

Alpert offered the presidential panel six recommendations for dealing better with use of force, especially deadly force:

▪  Examine more closely how officers reached a decision to use their guns, including those where the officers found alternatives to pulling a trigger. In a world flooded with smartphones, the Internet and lawsuits, the challenge of gathering all the pertinent information is heightened, he said. Facts uncovered through lawsuits can fill in missing information, Alpert said.

▪  Use what’s learned through lawsuits to improve policies, training and supervision.

▪  Have police involved in use-of-force situations explain their decisions – good and bad – to fellow officers as a training tool for ways to resolve encounters without gunplay.

When Michael Berkow was chief in Savannah, he used that technique. “The better sessions included officers who explained what they did right and how potentially violent situations were resolved without violence,” Alpert said.

▪  Press officers to explain in detail why they resorted to firing. “I was in fear for my life,” is not sufficient, Alpert said. Police should explain their tactical decisions leading up to a shooting and the reasons they felt threatened, afraid or why they responded the way they did.

▪  Create a “force factor” standard that connects the level of force to the amount of resistance from suspects. If officers responded with greater or lesser force than the level of threat, it raises a red flag that requires more scrutiny.

▪  Establish searchable national databases of all law enforcement agencies so citizens “can learn the important trends that politicians, policy makers, trainers and the public need to know,” Alpert said.

This story was originally published March 22, 2015 at 5:24 PM with the headline "USC professor, others decry lack of reliable information when police shoot in the line of duty."