Police resist bias data collection out of fear of blame and accusation.

Evidence

Personally, I have been in meetings in which law enforcement officials resisted the collection of additional data because they were afraid it would be used as “gotcha data,” and provide ammunition to point fingers and cast blame. This fear on the part of law enforcement about the potential downsides of transparency is understandable. 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: Directly serves the reader’s research on whether corrective/monitoring interventions trigger defensive reaction rather than acceptance — in the institutional/legal context.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 424