■■ topic paper – police practices

Plan – require body cameras

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Plan – require body cameras

Inherency

Status Quo Obama policy of body cameras is minimal relative to scale/# of police – solvency is (maybe good, who knows, haven’t tried it yet)

CAPPS writer at CityLab 2014 (Kriston, also former senior editor at Architect magazine, “8 Ways to Get Serious About Police Reform”, http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/12/how-to-get-serious-about-police-reform/383395/, note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

President Obama has asked Congress for $75 million to fund 50,000 police body cameras. Something had to be done after the events of Ferguson, and this technology might have clarified what happened between Brown and Wilson. Yet as critics everywhere are noting bitterly now, video evidence of Garner dying in an illegal police chokehold didn't lead to a trial.//// Whether police outfitted with body cameras will lead to fewer lethal interactions is an open question, but the research isn't being done to test both the unintended consequences and the unintended upsides, Roman says. Who can do this research? "Somebody who's objective, somebody who's not part of government, somebody who's not part of law enforcement, who doesn't have an ideology about it, who just transparently, objectively, empirically evaluates the evidence on whether it leads to better outcomes."//// Does that mean that President Obama, in the meantime, rushed to judgment by asking for body cameras now? "Given 17,000 law-enforcement agencies, 50,000 cameras is a drop in the bucket," Roman says. "But to put them out there and then not determine how they are affecting police behavior, defendant behavior, and just general citizens' behavior, I think that would be a mistake."

Solvency

SWAT teams should be made to wear body cameras, with regulations on data retention, access etc

ACLU 2014 (American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing”, June 2014, https://www.aclu.org/report/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police, p41 note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

A requirement that SWAT officers wear body cameras would create a public record of SWAT deployments and serve as a check against unnecessarily aggressive tactics. The ACLU generally takes a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance cameras in American life, but body cameras are different because of their potential to serve as a check on police overreach. Any policy requiring SWAT officers to wear body cameras should have in place rigorous safeguards regarding data retention, use, access, and disclosure.108

Plan – data collection (various)

Solvency (via federal, general)

Status quo police reports on officer related shootings are piecemeal and ad-hoc: Congress should mandate new data reporting by all states

JAWANDO & PARSONS center for American progress 2014 (Michele, vice president of legal progress, and Chelsea, director of crime and firearms policy at the center, “4 Ideas That Could Begin to Reform the Criminal Justice System and Improve Police-Community Relations” Center For American Progress”, Dec 18, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/civil-liberties/report/2014/12/18/103578/4-ideas-that-could-begin-to-reform-the-criminal-justice-system-and-improve-police-community-relations/)[AR SPRING16]

2. Enhance the collection of data on fatalities involving police///// In the immediate aftermath of the deaths of Brown and Garner, many commentators, community members, and policymakers around the country asked what should be relatively easy questions to answer: How often do police officers kill unarmed individuals? Are the deaths of Brown and Garner isolated incidents or examples of a larger trend of inappropriate use of force by police officers in communities around the country, and are communities of color disproportionately affected?//// Unfortunately, these are not easy questions to answer. As a number of reporters discovered over the past few months, there are significant gaps in the collection and analysis of data related to fatalities involving officers; these gaps make it very difficult to assess the scope of the problem either nationwide or in individual states and localities. The primary source for data about homicides in the United States is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, or UCR, program, through which federal, state, and local police agencies voluntarily report information about certain designated crimes, including homicides. Police agencies are asked to submit more detailed information about homicides, including demographic information about the victim and offender, the type of weapon used, the relationship between the perpetrator and offender, and some limited information about the circumstances of the killing, such as whether the homicide occurred during the commission or attempted commission of a felony. As part of this Supplementary Homicide Report, the FBI also collects information about deaths of individuals deemed “justified,” which includes two categories of homicides: felons killed by law-enforcement officers in the line of duty and felons killed by private individuals during the commission of a felony. There are a number of problems with these data. First, police departments’ reporting of homicide data to the UCR program is voluntary. And because police departments are not required to submit these data, many choose not to. For example, Florida does not provide any data to the UCR program, and other states submit these data in a piecemeal and incomplete fashion. So while FBI data tell us that between 2009 and 2013, law-enforcement officers killed 2,102 felons nationwide in the line of duty and used firearms in 99 percent of these cases, this is likely a very incomplete total count of fatalities involving police. Indeed, a comparison with another source of homicide data—the Centers for Disease Control, which compiles information on deaths based on death certificates—demonstrates the limitations of the FBI data. For 2012, the FBI reports 426 justifiable homicides nationwide; the CDC reports 550 such fatalities. Although these two sources use slightly different definitions, the disparity between the two numbers helps demonstrate the scope of the data gap. Additionally, the FBI only counts homicides by police officers that are deemed justified, so deaths by officers that do not fall into that category—such as shootings in which an officer is determined to have acted criminally—will not be included in the FBI count. Second, the data that local police agencies voluntarily provided to the FBI about officer-involved fatalities include limited information about the context and circumstances of those incidents and what immediately precipitated the fatal event, including whether the victim was armed.//// But even with this incomplete data set, there is evidence of a racial disparity in instances of police shootings of civilians. An analysis of FBI Supplementary Homicide data conducted by the independent, nonprofit news service ProPublica found that from 2010 to 2012, police killed young black men at much higher rates than their white peers: 31.17 per million for black males between the ages of 15 and 19 versus 1.47 per million for white males in the same age group. This analysis found that young black men in this age group were 21 times more likely to be shot by police than young white men. Reporters from Vox, a news website, obtained more detailed information from the FBI about each of the justifiable homicides reported in 2012 and found that a disproportionate number of reported felons who were killed by police were black.//// In order to develop smart laws and policies to address law enforcement’s inappropriate and illegal use of force, we need to understand the scope and nature of the problem. The federal government must improve data collection and require state and local law enforcement to provide detailed information about deaths caused by police officers. On December 11, 2014, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, a bill that would mandate such reporting by states and would give the U.S. attorney general the discretion to reduce federal law-enforcement funding to states that fail to comply by as much as 10 percent. This legislation would require states to submit demographic information about the victim, details about the time and location of the death, the law-enforcement agency involved, and “a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death.” The attorney general would then be required to conduct a study of this information in order to “determine means by which such information can be used to reduce the number of such deaths.”//// This legislation would be a significant step forward in addressing the current data gap on fatalities involving police, and President Obama should sign it into law as soon as possible. However, in order for this legislation to have the maximum beneficial impact, the administration must implement detailed regulations outlining exactly what kind of information about each of these incidents are required to be reported under the catch-all language in the legislation to ensure that states are reporting crucial information—including whether the victim was armed, whether the officer or officers involved had any relevant disciplinary history related to the use of force, and other key details regarding events precipitating the fatal event. Additionally, the regulations should provide that, absent “extraordinary circumstances,” the attorney general will exercise the discretion to impose the 10 percent funding penalty on states that fail to comply by the second year that the law is in effect.//// The next Congress should also act to expand the reporting mandate on states to include full participation in the FBI Supplementary Homicide Report to provide details on all homicides in a jurisdiction, not just those involving police. This information would provide a crucial baseline for understanding homicides in the states and help inform law-enforcement practices going forward. In particular, states should be required to provide information about homicides in which individuals invoke “stand-your-ground” defenses, another area in which there is an extreme paucity of reliable data.

Solvency (police expenditures)

There should be data collection on police expenditures as a way to check militarized police

Finally, the public has a right to know how the police are spending its tax dollars. The militarization of American policing has occurred with almost no oversight, and greater documentation, transparency, and accountability are urgently needed.

Solvency (police shootings – via FBI)

....require data on police shootings via FBI mandate

Bring Back the FBI Data on Police-Involved Shootings//// The FBI maintains data on homicides as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting program. It's somewhere between a recommendation and a requirement that the nation's 17,000 law-enforcement agencies report additional data on homicides to the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). Up until the early part of the last decade, Roman says, police-involved shootings were included in those data. They no longer are.//// A variable in the data-collection process that labeled a homicide with different values—as a suspect killed while committing a crime by a police officer, for example—was removed in the early 2000s. Ever since police-involved homicides were stripped from the report, reliable information on police shootings has been hard to come by.//// "We’ve had a lot of high-profile, police-involved homicides, and we can say very little about what we know about them. We can't say basic things," Roman says. "We can't say where they happen. We can't say how often they happen. We can't say if there is any racial disparity in how they happen."//// It's a problem that no one knows how many Americans are killed by police each year, because people turn to diverse and potentially unreliable sources for this information. "Without knowing any of those things" about these homicides, Roman says, "we have the debate that we're having, which is this ideologically based shouting match that's completely unhelpful."

Solvency (police shootings – via local/state)

....require data on police shootings via local/state mechanisms

Require More Detailed Local Data on Police Shootings//// While it seems that the deaths of Garner, Brown, Crawford, and many other unarmed black men contribute to a clear pattern, in fact we know very little about the circumstances of most police-involved shootings.//// What data we do have on these deaths excludes important information and context that would help to explain what's happening from a national perspective. Fairly standard reporting requirements might tell us the age, race, and gender of a victim—but they wouldn't tell us that Garner, for example, had had multiple run-ins with the officer who put him in a lethal chokehold.//// "They had a bad relationship. They were not strangers," Roman says. "We want to know things like that, because that builds up a pattern of data that lets us think about changing police policy." Demonstrating that an officer (or a department) has had continued bad interactions with an individual (or a neighborhood) could help to curb unnecessary violence.//// The available SHR data on police shootings don't include another important bit of contextual data. "The one real limitation with SHR that we came across with Trayvon Martin and that case is we didn't know where the event occurred. We didn't know if it happened inside a home, or inside a shop, or out on the street," Roman says. Given the publicity of that case, many people will remember that Martin was shot and killed in the street. But for hundreds of shootings, this knowledge may be lost.//// "Knowing that is really important to understand how there's differences in interactions in different places," Roman says. "If we want to think about racial disparities, for instance, we'd really like to know what percentage of homicides happen in a home versus on a street. We'd want to know the same thing about police-involved homicides."//// These are the easiest fixes that law-enforcement agencies could adopt to improve our understanding of when, where, and how these deaths happen. "These are not hard data to get," Roman adds. "This is not a heavy lift for local law enforcement."

Solvency (who is targeted – via DOJ)

The Dpt. of Justice should constrain and condition paramilitary weapons/tactics

13. The Department of Justice should improve oversight of the Byrne JAG program by providing guidance to grantees on the importance of exercising restraint when using paramilitary weapons and tactics and tracking the race, ethnicity, sex, and age of all people impacted by the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics purchased using Byrne JAG funds.

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