this is the police 2 the mystery of the black box

Sometimes, incompetent data management by the government means that information just doesn't exist.

It took days to define the columns by hand, Delehanty said. The data was in an old, rarely-seen format (a fixed-width delimited text file) without the necessary file that would automatically define the data columns. After a few weeks of waiting, the CD arrived and Delehanty dug out a computer that still had a CD-ROM drive. He finally reached a person by using the field office's media line, only to learn that the only way to get the data was by mail, on a CD (compact disk). The phone number for researchers led to a phone tree that automatically hung up after Delehanty picked the academic option. The email provided by the FBI for researchers to request data bounced back.

In the summer 2019, Delehanty embarked on an effort to get raw data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Database. It's unreliable and often inaccurate, and this has really precluded a lot of study and understanding and also accountability in real-time of local, state and federal police.'Įven when the government does keep data, it's incomplete and often held on laughably out-of-date technology. 'Data on policing is notoriously terrible,' said Casey Delehanty, a political scientist at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina. But the databases rely on media reports of deaths, not police department, city, state or government data, for the simple reason that many police departments are not forthcoming with this information. Thanks to databases like these, it's clear that Black people are killed at a disproportionate rate by police officers, making up 24% of deaths despite being only 13% of the population, according to Mapping Police Violence.

This is the police 2 the mystery of the black box