 Is that anything else here is, Dr. Shea? Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to New York. Welcome to John Jay College. My research area primarily is focused on police policy and practice issues, largely from the strategy level. And prior to becoming an academic, I had a full police career in Newark, New Jersey. And I retired as a police captain. And I was literally at a fork in the road. It was either become a deputy chief, get promoted, stay, and have more of the same. Or it was finish my PhD and go on to a new career. And I decided that I wanted to try something different. And that's what I did. And I took what I learned from the police department between 1985 and 2005. And I'm now trying to bring that to the academic side of things, looking at police problems and issues with data. And I am a quantitative researcher. I don't do a lot of qualitative stuff, which is why I like the data realm. And I'm going to introduce a couple things to you today, some of which dovetail on what you heard earlier by our folks from the BJS and the FBI. And I hope to add to that a little bit. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I see police use of force translating into policy issues that can create a constructive dialogue with the community and bring some sort of crime theory to bear on that. And you'll see how that works in just a moment. First, I think if we open up by talking about that use of force data and information improves knowledge and awareness, it leads me to this opening statement. This is attributed to a businessman in the United States. And it goes that if measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement, if you can't measure something, you cannot understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't control it. And if you can't control it, you cannot improve it. One of the only ways to do that is to get yourselves into the data, no matter what it happens to be. Data reveals a lot of different things to us. It tells us about strong points. It tells us about weak points. It talks about budget issues. It tells us about human interaction issues. But the reality is it brings to bear knowledge and awareness that we do not have at this point in time. It facilitates control. We're talking about controlling police use of force through training, supervision, and policy development. All of these really big high level issues that inform strategy, they inform practices, they enable us to look at something and say, we need to refine this, we need to do away with this, we need to come up with a different approach. If we are able to control police use of force, we can understand the incidents and we can understand the prevalence of it just as the CDC does with disease spread and things like that. Right now, we don't have a good handle on that. We have at best some sporadic research from single cities or maybe a couple of cities, some of which is sponsored by the federal government, some is through the research initiatives of single researchers. We really don't have a good handle on the national picture of what this looks like. We are often enamored by the anecdotal evidence and the case studies that seem to have these generalizable qualities. Well, if it happened here, it must be happening everywhere and that seems to be a large theme that is running through police use of force today. I don't happen to believe that that's true. So I ask, what's the problem? It's led, this lack of data has led to a fundamental misunderstanding about police use of force. I think in a number of different ways. We don't have this good national understanding because none of the data is really being collected at its lowest level. We have some understanding of deadly use of force, but we don't have anything really good to compare that to. We don't know how often police officers around the country are employing different kinds of force like canines or mechanical force. We have some understanding through some research on taser deployment and what the implications are for that, but we don't know how widely those things are being done. I understand the limitations though of trying to capture all of this, but we're talking about capturing every time a police officer puts their hands on someone, that is a massive undertaking compared to what we're trying to do with deadly force alone. So then we start to scale that back and say, well, all right, if we're not gonna do every time a police officer puts their hands on someone, how about when they deploy the taser, when they deploy the dog, when they deploy the baton, or is it the level of injury that somebody sustains? And right now we don't have good measures on non-fatal injuries versus fatal injuries either. So when we talk about wrapping our arms around this monster, we haven't even conceptualized what we are talking about when we say police use of force. Is it deadly force? Is it mechanical force? Is it all force? What do we wanna do? Because we don't have that data, what tends to happen is that emotional arguments backfill the logic. We do get a lot of anecdotal case stories, dare I say some of the things that have been recent in the press like Ferguson, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, some of the more prominent ones are not necessarily representative of the entire picture about what's going on in use of force around the country. They are celebrated cases. They all have to be looked upon for their accountability features and some of the important aspects of use of force. But whether or not they represent police use of force throughout the country is a completely different story. And I don't think that these handful of incidents are going to bring us to a conclusion that the police use of force is either out of control or it's a crisis or it's an epidemic or the other words that have been attached to it recently. Much to my dismay by the way, this is a fault of the police themselves. They have yet to capture the data. They have yet to advocate for capturing the data to get a good handle on these things. If that's the case, we don't have the data. We don't have a good outlook on things. We can't compare deadly force to non-deadly force or accidents to intentional shootings. We have none of this data. How do we propose to solve this issue? Well, we need a more flexible, in-depth, robust data system. We need something like Nibers. The national incident-based reporting system is just what it sounds like. National, incident-based reporting system. National means it's national in scope. It covers the entire country. I would like to see that for the police departments in the country that it be mandatory, not necessarily voluntary. Voluntary means limited participation and limited participation means limited coverage. Changing the 10th Amendment to have that happen is gonna be a really big undertaking. The question is whether or not the 10th Amendment should be sacrosanct in such an area that is politically and socially important to us. If it's this important that it occasions these kinds of conferences, that it occasions the presidential task force to look at, then 10th Amendment to have police departments capture the data doesn't seem like that big an issue to me. It's incident-based. One of the things that we have talked about in policing for a long time, and from the academic side as well, is that incident-based data captures the fine details and the contextual differences of an incident. Something that aggregate data does not. Aggregate data will mask the features of an incident that we need to tap. You've heard of something called death by 1,000 qualifications, if you will. Someone said earlier that the Washington Post data set, which is sort of trying to fill this gap on incident-based data, said that black and male and unarmed were more likely to be shot than white, male, and unarmed. If that is true, and I haven't looked at the data myself, but if that is true, that is incident-level data that we need to talk about. We need to figure out why that is happening. But there are severe limitations in the Washington Post data set that haven't talked about. Things like offender variables are very, very, very, very limited. There's almost no information on officer-level variables, and there is no information on environmental-level variables that I will talk about in a little while. Aggregate data masks all of those things. Incident-level data breaks them apart and enables us to test theories, test different hypotheses, examine relationships between things like officer and offender, offender and circumstance, when controlling for other levels of officer involvement or organizational composition, all these things that we don't have right now that contextualize a given shooting. This model that I'm proposing should, at some point, become available to the public. It should not be captured exclusively by the government, left of the government, and then no one ever does anything with it. I think that local police departments should have access to this data, to begin a constructive dialogue, so that local policies can be informed by regional and national trends that are going on. No one police department in the country is going to capture enough data on use of force because it is such a low-frequency event that it's going to explain what's going on in a particular area. You may have to have several police departments from several counties or regions to explain how these trends are playing out on larger levels. Nibers is superior to FBI UCR data. We know how well it's been done in the past. It is used to look at patterns and relationships on these kinds of crimes. These are the very sorts of things that we can use, incident-level data for, to unmask relationships on when we're talking about police use of force. As things I've just mentioned, contextual variables in the environment, the officer, the setting, the circumstances, essentially understanding the who, what, where, when, how, and why of a use of force transaction, most of which we know nothing about today. So if we had a system like this, what do we want it to do for us? How do we sell this to people? Why is it important to everybody? Well, staving off a DOJ consent decree is probably one of the big things. Reducing and or eliminating lawsuits is another one. But as I thought to myself, when I was putting this together, I said, well, those things are external to the police department. And sometimes police department in their insular, provincial ways may save themselves, but we're not really interested in what's going on outside. And if we get sued, we're insured, and if the DOJ wants to come in, they have, that's fine, we'll fight them and we'll, you know, we'll do whatever it takes to appease them. But, and then I said, well, if they didn't care about what was happening outside, wouldn't they at least care what's happening on the inside with their officers? Wouldn't they at least want to keep their officers safe? And there's a lot of discussion about training and policy, but it's not wrapped around anything empirical. So we don't know what police departments feel about keeping their officers safe and using data. I happen to think that it's not, it's not on their radar from that perspective. And just like body cameras and dashboard cameras were first sold as this is all external and very quickly as they became to be adopted in police departments, police departments realized that there was a lot of internal value and that they brought capacity and value and support to the organization. And they are getting more and more acceptance as the adoption goes on. In the Newark Police Department, I recall when I was doing one of the early evaluations of dashboard cameras, I had gotten a complaint from someone who said, I was a woman who said that a police officer propositioned her in so many words. And when the investigation began and we began to look at the video, nothing could have been further from the truth. And it was one early example of how the data could be used internally to support the police in the things that they do. Because I also happen to believe that police officers are doing the right thing in most of the circumstances. And that this data that I'm talking about can only help them through policy training and these other internal mechanisms. A steady flow of information is the root to performance. If the police department doesn't have a steady flow of data coming in from all different metrics, if you don't have a business plan that you're following, if you don't know what it is you're trying to capture, what goals you're trying to achieve and you're not measuring your performance, you're not gonna get anywhere. That plays on the theory of rational technical organizations compared to what are known as institutional organizations. So rational technical theory would suggest that police departments would put in place a performance framework and then collect data to achieve their goals. Whereas an institutional framework suggests, well, we don't really need that per se and even if we did have that, we're more driven by political influences and cultural goals and the informalities of the organization regardless of the technical goals. And there is a lot of that present in police departments. They are politically driven machines. However, this notion of institutionality should not take over the rational goals. And that's a lot of where my research is focused, making police departments more rational, collecting data, creating performance management frameworks surrounded by a business plan that a police department can return to to say, this is what we said we were gonna do in January, 365 days later, these are the things that we've actually achieved. That's a rational performance framework. Use of force is an aspect of that kind of performance. And I don't think anybody could say that deadly force or use of force is not a performance measure. One of the most important components of collecting data and using that data proactively is to discuss things with the community, acknowledge shortcomings on use of force, acknowledge the baseline level of use of force in a given city. Right now, most police departments can't do that. They can't undertake a conversation about use of force. They're afraid to talk about it. This ethos of solidarity and secrecy surrounded by bravery is kept quiet. It's not talked about very frequently. And so what happens is the community invariably fills in the gaps with anecdotal evidence or rumors or variables that are easy to fulfill, things like my own personal experience with the police leads me to believe that that's true. Or vicarious experience. My husband, my wife, my cousin was treated poorly. Therefore everybody must have been treated poorly. And the police themselves can never pull out the data and say, this is where we were in January. This is where we are in June. This is where we are in December. To defend themselves and have an open rational discussion. I think those things are some serious shortcomings that the police just haven't entered into by getting the data. Even at the most local level, if you come to the biggest police departments in the country, most of them don't have really robust incident-based data on offenders, victims, excuse me, offenders, police officers and environmental variables. To tie this all together, we have to have a factual understanding of the depth of use of force before we can apply terms like crisis and epidemic and widespread and discrimination and disparate treatment. Right now, a few celebrated cases around the country have given rise to almost a moral panic of sorts where police departments around the country are hunkering down in this bunker mentality, circling the wagons afraid to talk about use of force. They are being defined by these incidents around the country. They are being defined by things like the police do these things. The police is everyone. If you don't have the data to suggest that it's not everyone, then it is everyone. You are defined by those circumstances. Collect the data. Let's find out what the baseline measures are. Let's have something to compare against. They, I think there's been a lot of media circus around these things that have allowed people to hijack the discussion on police use of force. The last police public contact survey, I think it was done in 2008, suggests 40 million contacts with the police. 40 million contacts with the police, the Washington Post has captured in about a year and three months or a year and four months, 1,254 fatal encounters. That translates to roughly, if my math is correct and I'm thinking off the top of my head, something like 1,000th of a percent of the encounters end in some sort of fatal encounter. I don't think that that is cause for alarm. That maybe it could be lower. We'd have to find out. The reason we don't know how that baseline plays itself out is because we don't know how many people are actually at risk for being subjected to police use of force. Another difficult measure to wrap your arms around. The reality is that we need more data, we need better data, and the Washington Post is set out to do that. It's incomplete, it's not a great data set, but some of the preliminary research that I have done on it sort of dispels a lot of myths around age, sex and race and the relationship to whether or not people are more or less likely to be shot and killed by the police. Thank you very much. I'll leave this for you. There's a paper that accompanies my presentation that I suspect that NACO will make available to everybody. And let me turn it over to my colleague for her presentation.