In 2016, the D.C. City Council unanimously passed the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act, partly based on a pilot program in Richmond, California, that sought to implement a holistic approach to crime fighting. Recently, the ACLU of the District of Columbia (ACLU DC) filed suit against the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to implement the component of the NEAR Act that requires police to track demographic and other relevant data of individuals who police stop and frisk for weapons or otherwise search. MPD Chief Peter Newsham has admitted the department has not yet been able to comply with the law’s data collection requirement and recently a federal judge indicated that he was preparing an injunction in ACLU DC’s favor to compel the department to produce and publish the data.
As a policing researcher, the value of new empirical data is high, because, until recent decades, we haven’t had much of it. For just one example, this paucity of reliable policing data led the federal government to underestimate the number of persons shot and killed by police in the United States by about 150 percent every year. Thanks to the researchers at the Washington Post, we now know that police officers fatally shoot an average near 1,000 individuals every year instead of the roughly 400 that were annually reported by the FBI. Data is particularly helpful when trying to measure the racial and ethnic impacts of intrusive policies like stop and frisk because claims of racial bias are nearly impossible to prove in a single circumstance, but data can support or undermine claims of racial bias depending on population and other variables. While numbers by themselves cannot tell the whole story of any given policy, well-cultivated data can show where and in what circumstances disparities arise, giving researchers information to explain what is happening.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/mpds-near-act-implementation-wrong-way-do-right-thing
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