Since the killing of George Floyd in May, a broad, bipartisan consensus has emerged that policing practices in America need reform. And yet, Congress has been unable to coalesce around a reform package, with Senate Republicans and House Democrats aligning behind different proposals that don’t appear close to reconciliation.
Election-year politics undoubtedly explains part of the gridlock, but so too does a fact that might surprise most Americans.
For all the attention on policing, we simply don’t have enough good data on how it is actually practiced in communities across the country. Because we don’t have this data, it is often hard to prove — or disprove — which reforms can advance the twin goals of reducing police misconduct and keeping communities safe.
Right now, there are no national transparency requirements for police departments, which would provide a more complete picture of how police departments operate. More data in three particular areas — use of force, officer misconduct, and the use of certain tactics like no-knock warrants — would promote accountability and allow for more objective analysis of certain policies that could potentially be implemented at a national level.
In 2014, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), which requires police departments to report comprehensive data on all police-involved civilian deaths. However, the U.S. Department of Justice has not executed the mechanism of enforcement specified in the law — a ten percent loss of law enforcement grant funding for noncompliance. Unsurprisingly, most law enforcement agencies have not yet submitted any data to the government.
Police union contracts often contain provisions that protect officers’ disciplinary records from being publicized, which explains how the accused killer of George Floyd, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, could have 17 different misconduct complaints on his record without any public knowledge prior to Floyd’s death. In other cases, some police union contracts require departments to expunge misconduct records after a certain period of time, meaning that officers with long histories of misconduct can be re-hired at different police departments with no knowledge of this behavior.
And then there are no-knock warrants, which allow law enforcement officers to enter a suspect’s residence without giving prior notice or announcing their arrival. These are supposed to be granted only in cases where an announcement of presence by police officers would give suspects time to either destroy any evidence of drugs or locate a weapon. Walter Signorelli, professor at John Jay College and former NYPD inspector, told Rolling Stone, “if you’re doing a case and you knock on the door and say, ‘police, we’re outside,’ they’ll throw the drugs in the toilet bowl or out the window. In those cases, you have to tell the judge that if you knock on the door, they’ll destroy the evidence, and then you have no case.”
In practice, however, this type of warrant can be dangerous for officers and suspects alike, and can end tragically as it did in the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot eight times in her home in March 2020 by Louisville Metro Police officers who mistakenly believed drugs were being sold from her residence. Without current, comprehensive data on the prevalence of these no-knock warrants, the details of the cases in which they are used, and the outcomes of their usage, it is difficult to determine their overall effects and make objective decisions about when (or whether) no-knock warrants should be used.
In 2020, Congress can and should pass a bipartisan policing reform bill that does more than just improve information reporting on policing practices.
But getting better data is something that simply must be done immediately to give policymakers the tools to make the best decisions in the years ahead. For example, Congress could require all police departments wishing to remain eligible for federal grants to submit to the federal government a dataset that includes: information on every use of physical force that either results in serious injury or death, or involves the use of a firearm, whether an officer fires it or simply threatens to fire; information about each misconduct complaint filed against each of their officers; and information about each no-knock warrant granted. These datasets would be aggregated in one publicly accessible database. As an alternative to identifying officers by name, each officer could be assigned a numerical code to ensure some level of privacy.
The online database could allow for visitors to sort all incident reports by police department and by officer code for the easy detection of outliers. The officer code would be consistent across all three reporting categories, so it would be easy to see, for example, if an officer with a disproportionate number of misconduct complaints was also especially prone to using physical force. To facilitate compliance among smaller departments lacking the resources necessary for extensive data collection and reporting, Congress could offer compliance assistance grants similar to those described in the JUSTICE Act, sponsored by Senator Tim Scott (R-SC).
This national database is a small but essential step to improve police accountability, reduce police misconduct, and keep communities safe.
Julia Baumel is a policy analyst with The New Center. She is the author of the New Center's paper on the policing data gap.