Racial bias debates in policing are starved by uncollected, unstandardized data

Evidence

Local law enforcement agencies should collect more data about their routine enforcement activity. Collecting stop data, for example, allows agencies to take inventory of their enforcement activities and practices, as well as the impact of that activity on the public. By having this information, an agency is able to continuously assess whether its officers’ actions are in line with the agency’s policies, priorities, values, and goals. Without this information, it can be hard to empirically assess what is occurring on the ground and what it might mean for wider police-community relations. As discussed, it can be difficult to have informed debates about the role of race in police use of force because the data are often not collected. When the data are collected, the information tends to be incomplete and unstandardized, making systematic analysis difficult, if not impossible. As such, there have been frequent calls for law enforcement to collect standardized use of force data broken down by race and other demographics (Apuzzo & Cohen, 2015; United States Commission on Civil Rights, 2018). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 421

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on the broader question of how claims about measured bias depend on what gets officially recorded — parallels measurement-gap themes across the reader’s social-capital and prejudice literature.
• 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…, 421