Some readers may remember the above map that displayed a comparison between laws that govern police transparency and the number of law enforcement officer deaths per state in 2009. It was part of an article I wrote to determine if the common rationalization for keeping police misconduct records secret, that it is a matter of police officer safety, was valid or not.
While the analysis appeared to indicate that this wasn’t a valid excuse, the methodology garnered a criticism in that looking at total deaths was misleading since that includes accidents and natural cause fatalities.
So, I went back to the drawing board…
I did some digging and some crunching to see if there was a better way to determine whether there were any correlations between officer safety and police transparency. For that, I turned to the old standby that we use for all our other comparative statistics, the FBI/DOJ Uniform Crime Reporting statistics which also include a breakdown of homicides and assaults against police officers.
However, if we look at just the rate of homicidal police officer fatalities, the results are inconclusive, even when I stretch the time frame out to three years worth of data because the number of homicidal deaths for police officers is simply too small in number to draw any good statistical data from.
So, I looked at a larger set of numbers, the total assaults + homicidal fatalities for police officers in 2008 and I found something a bit more interesting:
The above graph shows the relative transparency of police misconduct records vs both the rate of deaths by homicide per 100,000 officers and the rate of alleged assaults on officers per 100,000 officers. The states that are most transparent in regards to police misconduct show the lowest overall rate of alleged assaults on officers while states that are most restrictive show the highest rate of alleged assaults.
As you can see, the data on homicides is more inconclusive but would appear to indicate that there is no correlation between police transparency and homicidal violence against police officers. Which would also appear to invalidate the argument that keeping police misconduct records secret keeps police officers safe. But it’s the combined assault and homicide rates that are striking when compared to police transparency by state because this appears to show an inverse relationship between officer safety and police transparency.
In other words, when we look at assaults on police officers, it would seem as though keeping police misconduct records from the public appears to make police officers less safe, not more safe. However, we should keep in mind that the number of assaults on officers is a matter of self-reporting, meaning that this is the number of times officers have claimed to have been assaulted. Also, in many states, the bar for what qualifies as assault against an officer is FAR lower than what qualifies as assault for the rest of us. (for example, pushing an officer would be assault while pushing another person wouldn’t.)
For those interested in seeing how we generated this data, the table below contains the data per state and shows the following information:
State – State abbreviation
PMR – The NPMSRP Police Misconduct Rate per 100,000 officers for the 12-month period of April 2009 – March 2010
FOI – The NPMSRP police transparency index that shows how transparent each state is based on the laws that exclude police records from public freedom of information requests or place limits on the type of information that can be released. 1.0 is the most transparent while 4.0 is the least transparent. (read here for more details)
MR v LEO – The law enforcement homicidal fatality rate per 100,000 police officers by state as an average for years 2006, 2007, and 2008.
VC v LEO – The violent crime (alleged assaults (2008 only) plus homicidal fatalities as described above) for police officers per 100,000 officers by state. (blank states did not submit data to the FBI/DOJ in 2008)
| State | PMR | FOI | MR v LEO | VC v LEO |
| AK | 476.19 | 1.0 | 0.00 | 1984.13 |
| AL | 696.06 | 3.0 | 9.28 | 2412.99 |
| AR | 906.99 | 3.0 | 10.99 | 4991.20 |
| AZ | 1038.76 | 4.0 | 12.92 | 16431.52 |
| CA | 589.28 | 4.0 | 5.33 | 9403.01 |
| CO | 758.10 | 4.0 | 5.74 | 6983.69 |
| CT | 926.78 | 2.0 | 0.00 | 8769.69 |
| DC | 1795.74 | 1.0 | 7.48 | 2319.49 |
| DE | 609.76 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 28048.78 |
| FL | 978.06 | 2.0 | 8.99 | 18106.39 |
| GA | 831.65 | 1.0 | 5.49 | 3570.89 |
| HI | 300.30 | 2.0 | 11.12 | 10421.53 |
| IA | 755.96 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 9090.91 |
| ID | 1265.82 | 4.0 | 12.41 | 9394.39 |
| IL | 789.30 | 4.0 | 5.37 | |
| IN | 1558.32 | 2.0 | 12.75 | 12498.41 |
| KS | 381.74 | 4.0 | 4.89 | 10531.98 |
| KY | 525.04 | 2.0 | 8.54 | 7576.73 |
| LA | 1103.66 | 2.0 | 17.34 | 9800.07 |
| MA | 1089.77 | 2.0 | 2.01 | 513.78 |
| MD | 825.92 | 4.0 | 6.40 | 24617.45 |
| ME | 489.98 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 10244.99 |
| MI | 748.56 | 2.0 | 5.13 | |
| MN | 1488.50 | 1.0 | 0.00 | 2232.75 |
| MO | 623.40 | 2.0 | 9.24 | 14963.87 |
| MS | 1418.16 | 4.0 | 6.57 | 3670.15 |
| MT | 1211.39 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 14960.63 |
| NC | 575.94 | 3.0 | 7.56 | 9621.63 |
| ND | 408.50 | 2.0 | 0.00 | 6209.15 |
| NE | 1432.25 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 6989.40 |
| NH | 935.31 | 4.0 | 25.98 | 10743.05 |
| NJ | 463.26 | 2.0 | 3.09 | 7347.35 |
| NM | 1310.68 | 4.0 | 8.09 | 17993.53 |
| NV | 541.20 | 1.0 | 5.82 | 12209.03 |
| NY | 510.36 | 2.0 | 2.72 | 1261.50 |
| OH | 983.98 | 1.0 | 7.63 | 2323.42 |
| OK | 987.65 | 2.0 | 4.33 | 11752.22 |
| OR | 1307.30 | 3.0 | 11.32 | 6412.00 |
| PA | 1004.48 | 4.0 | 8.00 | 13406.44 |
| RI | 813.01 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 14634.15 |
| SC | 872.32 | 1.0 | 14.69 | 7328.11 |
| SD | 698.32 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 11243.02 |
| TN | 1133.36 | 2.0 | 6.44 | 12750.34 |
| TX | 782.15 | 2.0 | 9.49 | 9137.16 |
| UT | 998.73 | 2.0 | 0.00 | 14513.39 |
| VA | 558.02 | 4.0 | 12.64 | 6931.05 |
| VT | 2115.92 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 3403.86 |
| WA | 924.09 | 2.0 | 9.43 | 8137.67 |
| WI | 506.21 | 2.0 | 2.56 | 8631.18 |
| WV | 1815.79 | 2.0 | 8.77 | |
| WY | 1005.75 | 4.0 | 0.00 | 6393.68 |
So, as the table shows, there really aren’t any other clear correlations we can draw here as there doesn’t appear to be any apparent relationship between police misconduct rates and the rates of violence against police officers.
There also doesn’t appear to be a clear correlation between misconduct rates and the degree of transparency per state, however, we can’t be certain whether that’s a matter of how much misconduct allegedly occurs or how much misconduct is hidden in those states where access to data about misconduct is restricted.
In any case, because there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence that keeping information about police misconduct from the public improves safety for police officers, it begs the question of what the true reason is for states to keep information about police misconduct a secret.
If it’s not a matter of officer safety, what is it?
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I wonder if the states with more secrecy invite cops to lie more often about being assaulted. i.e. Some cops charge practically everybody they arrest with assault on cop. Since it’s a lot harder to fake a homicide that an assault that could explain why the homicide stats are more even between transparent and secretive states.
Travis,
Well, you could draw that conclusion and you may be correct. However, the problem with using the police homicide rate is that the numbers of those incidents are so small in number as to make drawing any conclusions using that data highly suspect.
The data set is just too small, even when I pushed it out to a three-year span there were a good number of states where there were no homicidal fatalities for police officers during that span of time. I can’t push back further than that because then I run into the problem of including years where these exclusionary rules and law enforcement officer bills of rights weren’t made into law in some of these states, which muddles the stats.
This is why I went to the assault stats, although, as you and I both pointed out, these are also open to debate in regards to just how valid they are as a true indication of violence against officers.
Of course, the whole problem, again, centers around this fundamental lack of transparency about the issue of police misconduct. If there weren’t so many places where this information was forcibly kept secret, we would know the answers and this project wouldn’t be necessary… but, no matter what set of data we use, there still just doesn’t seem to be any supporting proof that keeping police misconduct a secret improves officer safety.
I think what you are doing is the way to go… if for nothing more than, one can say that all the reported homicides of cops all started out as felony assaults.
I know that’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but I feel its factually correct.
The fact that you have to (literally) mine this type of data from public records, FOIA requests, threats of legal action, etc… because so many states and local governments go so far out of the way to hide it should speak volumes about the problem. As I have said to more than one police chief and sheriff. If misconduct is not a problem, then why are you doing everything you can to hide the numbers and prohibit people from looking at the reports and stats themselves?
That usually ends the conversation, with them walking away from me or hanging up the phone.
I wonder why…
John,
Well, unfortunately, it’s the only data we have to work with at the moment, so I have to make due with what I can get. I think that it still makes a strong case against hiding police misconduct data in the name of officer secrecy and, if we take away that argument, what reasonable argument is left for keeping it secret from the public? Especially when that data is a vital public safety concern.
Many of the states in red on the map at top, the states where there is a complete restriction on access to police misconduct data, there isn’t even an option to mine this data using legal action because the state governments have made it ILLEGAL for police departments and local governments to release that information. So, even if you sued and filed all the legal actions you could and even if the city or agency wanted to share that data, they can’t because it’s against the law.
I think this is one thing that people don’t understand when they ask why I use the sources of data that I use instead of filing 17,000+ FOIA requests to each and every law enforcement agency out there. Many of those agencies wouldn’t respond either because they are allowed to ignore those requests or they are required by law to ignore them.
…of course, it’s also necessary to understand that the police unions lobbied for it to be this way in those states.