Law enforcement fears data transparency because bias claims weaponize statistics against them

Evidence

In the current climate, bias has gone from a psychological observation to a political accusation commonly levied against police officers (Bazelon, 2016). In the long term, however, a reluctance to embrace empirical approaches comes with an even higher cost. Fear and defensiveness can get in the way of the openness required to take an honest accounting of the impact on the ground of an agency’s practices carried out in the aggregate. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 424

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the transparency/oversight tension in other law-enforcement reform literature and to the racial-profiling data debates discussed in this same book’s opening chapters.