In June, I started taking a closer look at "use-of-force data" in the St. Louis area. That's jargon for "What forms does an officer fill out when they hurt someone? Where does that information go? What does a department do with it?"

I pretty quickly ran into some barriers.

1/?

First off, a former policy advisor and researcher employed by the city had already tried to answer these questions. @howigetmynews especially wanted to look at "How much more often do police use force against Black people in St. Louis, compared to white people?"

2/?

But she found that, even working for the city, the police would only provide data for an FBI data collection called "Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted." It did NOT have every use-of-force incident that police reported. Just the ones where officers were injured.

3/?

Even reports filed through LEOKA are still missing some important data about use-of-force because it's not primarily intended to track that. ie, there's no way to know the race of the officer or the person they tried to arrest.

4/?

The report analyzed the available evidence, and still found that "officers report use-of-force incidents nearly three times as often in majority-black
neighborhoods as in majority-white neighborhoods."

Here's her report:
https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/mayor/initiatives/resilience/equity/documents/upload/Equity-Indicators-Baseline-2018-Report-Document.pdf

5/?

But when I talked to Garmendia, she emphasized that this was an undercount. First, not every officer necessarily files a report when they should. And second, it's impossible to know how many additional times officers used force without getting injured themselves.

6/?

Garmendia's report notes that she talked to police about this issue, so they started collecting more data in 2018. She had planned to analyze it for future reports, but the grant funding her work ran out and the mayor's office didn't retain her.

7/?

As a data reporter, I'm like, "OK, that means there's better data for me! And no one's seen it before, maybe!"

I contacted SLMPD about more extensive data, and asked if they had the info that the FBI collects in its voluntary use-of-force program (which started in 2019).

8/?

For context: Several other police departments (KCPD and St. Louis County PD) told me this data is collected by default in their investigations, so they just have to reformat it for the FBI. The FBI is releasing a look at the data sometime this summer.

9/?

But at first, SLMPD said they didn't have that information publicly. They say they're working on creating something they can give to the FBI, though.

10/?

I basically responded, Wait, someone who worked at the city said you'd have this data to analyze for their next report. That's printed this report published by the city. Can you explain why it's not available?

Their response:

11/?

I wanted to know when the new data would be publicly available, and what fields it would contain. Here was the response (which they'd already given me in another email).

12/?

I did FOIA the updated LEOKA data, which Garmendia worked with. SLMPD gave me an initial response on July 9, but has not sent me a total cost estimate or timeline.

I've followed up. They're normally a pretty quick agency! Hoping I'll get that data soon...

13/?

I have some questions about what SLMPD was saying in that email above, and I told them so. For instance, Missouri law says agencies can't use databases that prevent them from sharing public records with the public.

14/?

I spoke to experts who've worked with departments, interacted with similar data, etc. I found a number departments nationwide that publish this data yearly or even monthly. (St. Louis County PD publishes it yearly.)

So it's not clear why SLMPD is having these problems.

15/?

Anyway, at this point in journalism, the story changes from "let's look at what's happening" and "let's look at how we basically have no idea to actually know what's happening."

And so: https://news.stlpublicradio.org/law-order/2020-07-30/st-louis-police-use-of-force-data

By that I meant... "how we basically have no idea and can't actually know what's happening." Morning word salad.

Addressing a few questions in the main thread:

When an officer uses force (according to SLMPD manual), they fill out a form. They're keeping the forms, and the data does exist. But SLMPD says it's only able to make a subsection of that data public. https://twitter.com/MikeStucka/status/1288845218171822081?s=20