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National Use-of-Force Data to be Available Soon — But Will it Help?
FBI Task Force program began collecting data in 2019
In November 2018, the FBI announced a Task Force project that would entail collecting of data from law-enforcement agencies around the United States in an effort to shed light on the statistics surrounding police use of force. Data collection began in January 2019, and information the FBI will provide is said to be available this summer (2020).
While this is certainly timely in light of the recent events and protests against law-enforcement, the concern is that the information the FBI makes available will not necessarily be what the public is either expecting or hoping for.
In an incident with use of force during an arrest, we would not see any data on whether or not that use the force was within the bounds of departmental, or National policy — because that peice of information simply wasn’t part of the data being collected.
It’s also important to note that the program is both self-reported by agencies (through the FBI’s portal) and completely voluntary for officers.
If you’re someone who loves to play around with data, especially to get insights in light of this past months events, some bad news is that it is not completely clear the FBI is…
