Policing resource round-up: Where to find data, advocacy materials, and more information about American policing

A list of the most valuable online resources from organizations focused on policing.

by Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer, August 28, 2020

In the wake of yet another tragic police shooting, it’s more important than ever that the public be able to access clear, timely data about police behavior and connect with organizations fighting police brutality. Earlier this year, we summarized our key research on policing and showed that U.S. police kill civilians at a much higher rate than in other countries; now, for those looking for more information, we’ve compiled a (not exhaustive) list of the most valuable online resources from organizations focused on policing.

Data about police behavior and brutality:

Deaths by police:

• Mapping Police Violence has the most comprehensive database of killings by police in the United States, which is publicly available for download. They also publish data visualizations that help advocates communicate the gravity and severity of police violence.
• Data visualizations from Fatal Encounters show the national trends in deaths by police, by specific demographics like race and poverty levels across the country. Their database documents all deaths that happen when police are present or that are caused by police, and users can filter to examine specific categories, including deaths caused by on-duty law enforcement, off-duty law enforcement, as well as federal and local law enforcement.

Arrest, stop, and misconduct data:

• The Center for Policing Equity works at the intersection of data and advocacy, using data-driven interventions to partner with police departments across the country to better address community needs like mental health, immigration enforcement, and homelessness, as well as changes to departments to enhance diversity recruitment and retention, training and patrol practices.
• The NYCLU just released the NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database, a repository of complaints made by the public at the Civilian Complaint Review Board. This database includes over 300,000 unique complaint records involving over 80,000 active or former NYPD officers and the raw database is available for download.
• The Stanford Open Policing Project collects and standardizes data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the U.S. Data from over 200 million records of state and local police departments is freely available. A working paper from these researchers analyzes racial disparities in policing and finds that police stops and search decisions are heavily influenced by racial bias.
• Open Data Policing makes stop, search, and use-of-force data publicly available. This aggregated data covers all known traffic stops in North Carolina since 2002, Illinois since 2005, and Maryland since 2013.
• The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement compiles data on records of police racial profiling reports and this data is available to download for 2016-2019.

Police spending:

• The Vera Institute of Justice created a tool that allows individuals to analyze just how much money is allocated to policing and to explore how changes in each spending category could reduce the total policing budget.

Information about police reform and abolition:

(in alphabetical order)

• Campaign Zero tracks legislative changes and a curated collection of research across ten major categories of police reform, including limiting the use of force, community oversight, demilitarization, and fair police union contracts at the federal, state, and local levels. The organization’s platform is dynamic, informed by new research and community feedback.
• Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB) is a Minneapolis-based organization working to empower local communities to confront and end police brutality. With a local lens, CUAPB publishes reports on proposed and enacted legislation, as well as fact sheets and educational materials about debunking myths around policing.
• In New York, Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) leads the campaign to end discriminatory policing practices with a team of community members, lawyers, researchers, and activists.
• Critical Resistance curates a list of resources to provide education about the connection between policing and imprisonment, as well as a number of toolkits for advocates working toward dismantling the current law enforcement system and building viable alternatives in our communities.
• The Dream Defenders began in Florida as an effort to organize Black and Brown youth to build power and strength in their communities, and to advance a vision of safety and security that is less reliant on prisons and policing. They offer a downloadable toolkit that outlines the steps for communities to start divesting from police.
• The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a national organization supporting community-led efforts to defund police and to reinvest in long-term safety strategies like education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.
• MPD150 is a Minneapolis-based collection of local organizers, researchers, artists, and activists dedicated to shifting the discussion of police violence in Minneapolis from procedural reform to more meaningful structural change. They have an accessible and detailed resource list for readers seeking more in-depth information about changing policing.

Commentary:

• NPR’s Code Switch produced a podcast episode — A Decade of Watching Black People Die — with an in depth discussion with journalist Jamil Smith about the years of deaths of Black people at the hands of police and the media coverage of these frequent violent deaths.
• On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explores the intertwined history of policing and white supremacy, the current roadblocks to police reform, and some potential paths forward for the nation.
• The Untold Story: Policing is a four-part podcast series working to demystify police union contracts, as well as advocate for concrete steps to end police violence.
• After George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, NPR’s history podcast — Throughline —released an episode analyzing the centuries of tensions between police and Black communities.
• In a two-part episode of the podcast Intercepted, Ruth Wilson Gilmore makes the case for police and prison abolition, and offers a road map for understanding the current political moment of police brutality and resistance.
• Human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell offers step-by-step guidance to understanding calls for defunding and abolishing policing as we know it in an effort to reduce harm to individuals and communities in this piece for The Atlantic.
• In a recent article for Vanity Fair, Josie Duffy Rice of The Appeal presents the rationale for rethinking the policing and justice systems in the United States.

Finally, we’re always curating the best new research about the criminal justice system in our Research Library, which has a section dedicated to policing.

Half of states fail to require mask use by correctional staff

States are not reducing their populations sufficiently to slow the spread of COVID-19, and our survey reveals that 20 states are not even requiring masks to be worn by staff and most are not requiring incarcerated people to wear them.

by Emily Widra and Tiana Herring, August 14, 2020

The best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 in state prisons is to reduce the population density, but as we’ve found, states are moving far too slowly in this regard. In this new analysis, we find that states are also failing at the most modest mitigation efforts imaginable: requiring correctional staff and incarcerated people to wear masks.

Almost all states¹ are distributing masks to staff and incarcerated people,² but only half of all states are requiring that staff wear the masks at work. We examined the policies of each state’s Department of Corrections to see which states are requiring masks for staff.

30 states currently require correctional facility staff to wear face masks, while 20 states and the District of Columbia do not. Map updated on August 24, 2020 following a report from the South Carolina Department of Corrections that they are requiring staff to wear masks, although no policy requiring masks is available to the public. (Data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative from Departments of Corrections policies and news reports.)

Just because states require the use of masks by staff does not mean that the policy is adequately enforced. There have been a number of reports from incarcerated people that correctional staff have not been wearing masks appropriately when interacting with those who are in custody. In Arkansas, masks are required for staff, but an internal email from the state’s highest corrections official to the wardens of each prison in the state reveals that “hospitals are not wanting to treat our inmates because our staff are not following the [mask] guidelines that we are sending out.”³

Of course, even in states where masks are not required by correctional policy, staff can choose to wear them. But reports from incarcerated people and their families suggest this is wishful thinking. For example, in New Jersey — a state where the COVID-19 pandemic hit prisons early and hard — staff are not required to wear masks and reports from inside say that many staff are not wearing masks.⁴

As we all know by now, the federal government’s February guidance discouraging masks quickly proved to be misguided, and the most current research makes it even clearer that masks benefit both the wearer and everyone else.

Wearing masks protects the public:

• In states that only required certain employees to wear masks, there was no effect on the county-level daily COVID-19 growth rate, but requiring everyone to wear masks results in a significant decline in infections.
• Face masks have driven down rates of overall COVID infections, as seen in hospital settings, hair salons, and on cruise ships.
• Beyond COVID, masks have long been known to reduce the likelihood of transmission of epidemic respiratory illnesses. This is particularly true in community-living settings like dense prisons.

Masks protect the individuals who wear them:

• Wearing a mask reduces the likelihood of contracting COVID-19.
• Even if you still contract COVID-19 while wearing a mask, the disease is more likely to be mild or even asymptomatic.⁵

Requiring correctional staff to wear face masks is just commonsense: staff are responsible for most day-to-day movement in and out of prisons (and are therefore most likely to carry the virus in and out of them) and they are state employees who must adhere to state regulations and requirements. But states should not stop with mandating masks for staff; they should be requiring everyone in the facility to wear masks.
The obvious implication of the science behind using masks is that the more people who wear masks, the slower the virus will spread. Yet while 27 states require correctional staff to wear masks, only 15 state prison systems require incarcerated people to wear masks.⁶

15 states currently require incarcerated people to wear face masks, while 35 states and the District of Columbia do not. Strangely, Illinois is the only state that appears to require incarcerated people wear masks, but does not require the same for staff. Map updated on August 24, 2020 following a report from the South Carolina Department of Corrections that they are requiring incarcerated people to wear masks, although no policy requiring masks is available to the public. (Data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative from Departments of Corrections policies and news reports.)

The fact that far fewer states require incarcerated people to wear masks than correctional staff may reflect some reluctance to create conflict with incarcerated people over potential enforcement issues. (A more cynical view might interpret this hands-off approach as a callous lack of concern about incarcerated people’s lives and health.) But if correctional agencies care about protecting incarcerated people and staff, they could craft policies that reward those who wear masks, instead of policies that threaten disciplinary action for non-compliance.

We know that reducing the number of people behind bars is the best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 through prisons, jails, and their surrounding communities, but this analysis finds that many states are not even practicing the most basic preventative measure: requiring face masks in prisons, just as they are required by many states in other public spaces. State prison systems need to catch up before it’s too late.

Appendix table

Jails and prisons have reduced their populations in the face of the pandemic, but not enough to save lives

Our updated analysis finds that the initial efforts to reduce jail populations have slowed, while the small drops in state prison populations are still too little to save lives.

by Emily Widra and Peter Wagner, August 5, 2020

This article was updated on October 21st, 2021 with more recent jail and prison population data. That version should be used instead of this one.

At a time when more new cases of the coronavirus are being reported each day, state and local governments should be redoubling their efforts to reduce the number of people in prisons and jails, where social distancing is impossible and the cycle of people in and out of the facility is constant. But our most recent analysis of data from hundreds of counties across the country shows that efforts to reduce jail populations have actually slowed — and even reversed in some places.

Even as the pandemic has spiked in many parts of the country, 71% of the 668 jails we’ve been tracking saw population increases from May 1st to July 22nd, and 84 jails had more people incarcerated on July 22nd than they did in March. This trend is particularly alarming since we know it’s possible to further reduce these populations: in our previous analysis, we found that local governments initially took swift action to minimize jail populations, resulting in a median drop of more than 30% between March and May.

Meanwhile, state prisons — where social distancing is just as impossible as in jails, and correctional staff still come and go every day — have been much slower to release incarcerated people. Since January, the typical prison system had reduced its population by only 5% in May and about 13% as of July 27th. Below, we compare the population cuts in local jails to those in state prisons, focusing on just how little states are doing to keep their residents safe. (And note, our use of the term “reduction” is different from “release,” as we have found that there are multiple mechanisms impacting populations, and releases are but one part.)

Jail populations dropped quickly at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the local authorities who run jails have not sustained those efforts and populations have started to rise over the last two months. This recent increase is most dramatic in small jails (third slide) but is also true for larger jails (second slide.)

These graphs aggregate data collected by NYU’s Public Safety Lab. The Public Safety Lab is continuing to add more jails to their data collection and data was not available for all facilities for all days, so these graphs show jails where the Lab was able to report data for at least 120 of the 135 days in our research period. To smooth out most of the variations caused by individual facilities not being reported on particular days, we chose to present the data as 7-day rolling averages. The temporary population drop during the last week of May is the result of more facilities than usual not being included in the dataset, rather than any known policy changes.

The strategies jails used to reduce their populations in March and April varied by location, but they added up to big changes. In some counties, police issued citations in lieu of arrests, prosecutors declined to charge people for some low-level offenses, courts reduced the amounts of cash bail, and jail administrators released people detained pretrial or those serving short sentences for nonviolent offenses.

Just a few months later, many local jurisdictions have slowed — and in some cases, completely reversed — their efforts to reduce jail populations. Of the 668 jails we analyzed population data for, 71% of jails had population increases from May 1st to July 22nd, and 84 jails had more people incarcerated on July 22nd than they did in March.

For example, in Philadelphia, judges released “certain nonviolent detainees” held in jails for unspecified “low-level charges” and the Philadelphia police suspended low-level arrests reducing the city’s jail population by more than 17% by mid-April. But on May 1st, the Philadelphia police force announced that they would resume arrests for property crimes, effectively reversing the earlier reduction efforts.

Table 1: Largest known population reductions in large local jails

Meanwhile, in the spring, state Departments of Correction began announcing plans to reduce their prison populations — by halting new admissions from county jails, increasing commutations, and releasing people who are medically fragile, elderly, or nearing the end of their sentences. But these population reductions were small, amounting to only about 5% in the first two months and now about 13%, still significantly less than what jails accomplished in just the first few weeks. However, prisons may be seeing more “slow and steady” progress than jails are: while many jails have reversed course and are increasing their populations again, prison populations have continued on a downward trend since May. Unfortunately, that’s about as optimistic as we can be with these numbers. The drops aren’t significant enough to make social distancing possible inside prisons nor to ensure that all of the most vulnerable people have been released to safer conditions.

Table 2: Most state prison systems show only very modest population reductions since January (showing 17 states where recent data was readily available)

Some states’ prison population cuts are even less significant than they initially appear, because the states achieved those cuts partially by refusing to admit people from county jails. (At least two states, California and Oklahoma, did this.)
While refusing to admit people from jails does reduce prison density, it means that the people who would normally be admitted are still incarcerated, but in different correctional facilities that have more population turnover and therefore more chances for the virus to spread.

Other states are indeed transferring people in prison to outside the system, either to parole or to home confinement, but these releases are not enough to protect vulnerable incarcerated populations from COVID-19. For example, in California, thousands of people have been released weeks and months early, but the state’s prison population has only decreased by about 11% since January, leaving too many people behind bars in the face of a deadly disease. In fact, as of July 29, California’s state prisons were still holding more people than they were designed for, at 117% of their design capacity.

Every state prison system we’ve examined, except for North Dakota, has made smaller reductions than the typical jail. While jails made quick changes at the start of the pandemic and then leveled off or even reversed course, state prisons are at least making sustained, if far too small, steps.

Of the states with available data, the smaller systems have reduced their populations the most drastically. North Dakota’s prison population had already dropped by 19% in May. (North Dakota was also the state that we found to have the most comprehensive and realistic COVID-19 mitigation plan in our April 2020 survey.) Two months later, North Dakota has continued these efforts, reducing its prison population by a total of 25% since January, a greater percent change than any other state.

State and local governments clearly need to do more to reduce the density of state prisons and county jails. For the most part, states are not even taking the simplest and least controversial steps, like refusing admissions for technical violations of probation and parole rules, or releasing people that are already in confinement for those same technical violations. (In 2016, 60,000 people were returned to state prison for behaviors that, for someone not on probation or parole, would not be a crime.) Other obvious places to start: releasing people nearing the end of their sentence, those who are in minimum security facilities and on work-release, and those who are medically fragile or older.

Decision- and policy-makers need to recognize the dangers of resuming unnecessary jail incarceration during the pandemic, which is exactly what is indicated by the slowing and reversing of population reductions. Just as many states are seeing the tragic effects of “reopening” too soon, counties and cities that allow jail populations to return to pre-pandemic levels will undoubtedly regret it. If the leadership and success of local jails in reducing their populations early in the pandemic isn’t enough of an example for continuing these efforts at the state and local levels, officials may find some inspiration in the comparative success of other countries:

Table 3: Countries that immediately reduced their incarcerated populations in the face of the pandemic (showing 13 countries where current population data was readily available)

Prisons and jails are notoriously dangerous places during a viral outbreak, and public health professionals, corrections officials, and criminal justice reform advocates agree that decarceration will help protect both incarcerated people and the larger communities in which they live. It’s past time for U.S. prison and jail systems to meaningfully address the crisis at hand and reduce the number of people behind bars.

This article updates one published on May 1st and another published on May 14th with an updated dataset of local jail and state prison population reductions. Updated prison population data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative for 17 states from Departments of Correction July population reports. Updated jail reduction figures collected by the NYU Public Safety Lab.