How An Officer-Involved Shooting Database Can Influence Use Of Force Legislation

Speaker 1: 00:00 California state assembly members will vote on assembly bill three 92 as early as today. The proposal legislation would change the standard for police use of deadly force in California. According to the Washington Post fatal forced database, California has one of the highest rates of officer involved shootings in the country. That fatal forest project was started in 2015 after the police shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It was the first database of its kind to track officer involved shootings. Reporter Wesley Lowery led the project and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work is also the author of, they can't kill us all. Ferguson, Baltimore and a new era of America's racial justice movement. Wesley Lowery joins us to talk about the database and current legislation. Wesley, thanks for joining us. Speaker 2: 00:47 Of course. Anytime. Speaker 1: 00:48 So, you know, since 2015 your team at the Washington Post has been cataloging every fatal shooting involving a law enforcement officer into a database called fatal force. What inspired this work? Speaker 2: 01:01 Well by this work about five years ago. Um, when you think about it in August as that the say anniversary of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, it feels both like it couldn't possibly have been that long ago, but also like, maybe it's been a million years in that five year since so much has changed in the world consent. But you know, we were doing a lot of reporting on the ground. We are covering that fatal shooting, the protest, um, the outrage around it, trying to figure out what exactly happened. Um, these are the very early days of what became known as black lives matter, the protest movement. And as we both these stories, very often myself in other work orders on the ground would interview protesters, activists of rights attorneys, and they would say, look, there's a, there's a crisis that black men are being killed in the streets every single day, uh, within keynotes. Speaker 2: 01:46 And then being good reporters would call it the police and the police unions and law enforcement supporters. And they would say, no, no, no, no, no sales. We shouldn't almost never happen. Um, we don't know what people are talking about and our editors being smart elders would say, well, which of those two things is true? Either the police are killing people every single day or police shootings are rare and almost never happened. How can we use the Washington Post answering this question? So we started calling around asking, you know, police department, secretaries of state, and what we soon found was that there was no, uh, legal time, national depository, um, of, you know, detailed accounts of what was happening in police shootings. In fact that the federal data was remarkably lacking as it related to how many people were being killed by the police. And so that was only decided, hey, perhaps we can figure out a way to do this ourselves. Speaker 1: 02:36 How has the database being used? Speaker 2: 02:38 What we use it for primarily one is to track the overall number of how often people are being killed by police, but to, to do big sweeping analytical pieces where we look at what types of people are being killed by the police, under what circumstances, right? So we've done big pieces on, um, the number of people who are in the midst of a mental health crisis when they're shot and killed by police. We've looked at the number of people are killed because they had toy guns. We've looked at a number of people shot and killed while they're in moving vehicle. And so what the state allows us to do is not just look at the number of people, but also to look at how often different types of people and different circumstances are happening in police shootings and also to allow us to place whatever police shooting goes viral tomorrow into a bigger, a broader context. Speaker 1: 03:21 And looking at the nation, what do the numbers say back in 2015 when you all started this project and what did they say today? Speaker 2: 03:28 Certainly. Well, the numbers are remarkably, um, remarkably similar. Um, we have about the address under a thousand fatal police shootings every single year. Uh, what we see is that the majority of those cases are, are, are cases where the person is armed with a weapon. Although we know that that doesn't necessarily mean, um, that the shooting was justified or necessary, but it just speak to, uh, the threat of firearms and other weapons that police officers are facing and seeing, oh, I just said what we consistently seen is about three fatal shootings a day. Um, and that black victims, uh, remain overrepresented, right. And so a black Americans make up about 12% of the population. They make up about 24% of the people who are shot until that police. And that has remained pretty steady since we started doing this in 2015. Speaker 1: 04:17 And what can be gleaned from the data here in California? Speaker 2: 04:21 Well, so, so California being one of the largest [inaudible] also has some of the largest numbers of police shootings and several of the departments that have the most. And so, um, what, what's really interesting in southern California is both the La County sheriff's department. I've done both the La County sheriff's department as well as, um, the, uh, San Bernardino police departments. She shooting large number of people. Now these are very heavily in highly populated towns. Um, but still our ranking to just as high as basically any other department in terms of how often they're having fatal shootings. Speaker 1: 04:54 And here in California, the officer involved shooting of Stefan Clark is part of the driving force behind assembly woman. Surely Weber's Assembly bill three 92, which proposes to change the standard for use of deadly force from what an officer thinks is reasonable to what is necessary at that bill is expected to be voted on in the state assembly today. How much of an impact do you think your database has on legislation that's being crafted now? Okay. Speaker 2: 05:22 Is that our database in the work that we're doing can inform smart public policy at the state level, the federal level, but we've seen in California is one of many states. It's been on a relatively bleeding edge in terms of transparency around some of these issues. Uh, the release of records and documents and now having a real conversation about what is the legal standard as it relates to these fatal police shootings. And so, you know, I don't know that we can necessarily came credit for how the momentum was happening in California currently. But that said, I do think that the work we've done has been part of a mosaic of conversation and information that has swelled up since 2014 and 2015, um, around this issue. Um, and that has empowered public policy makers to try to implement new and smarter, um, laws to govern the way this works. Speaker 2: 06:11 Well, we know one of the first pieces we did, um, as part of our project was not even just about police shootings. What about how rarely police officer prosecuted because of them. And the reason for that is because of the way the laws are ran. Um, and so very often what we see in these cases as we, we watch on video, a shooting at the public believes should be out of line, but that according to the letter of the law, it's not illegal. And so California is attempting to do, is tempting to Brittany's things closer together. Um, and I do think that without these last few years, is that something that would have been very unlikely? Speaker 1: 06:42 I've been speaking with Wesley Vari, a journalist with the Washington Post. Wesley, thanks so much for joining us. Speaker 2: 06:49 Of course, anytime Speaker 1: 06:50 Wesley will be speaking at the San Diego Association of Black Journalists Scholarship reception at the qual Compaq Center this Friday, the event starts at 6:00 PM Speaker 3: 07:00 [inaudible].