Building a National Database of Police Stops and Use of Force

• In Event: Solving the Problem of Police Data: The National Justice Database

Abstract

The more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies across the United States vary greatly in the way they document policing behavior. To date, the Center for Policing Equity’s National Justice Database (NJD) has brought together data on vehicle stops, pedestrian stops, and use of force events from dozens of these agencies. In this presentation, we describe variation in stop and force data and discuss our efforts to standardize key data elements across agencies and over time. Combining data across agencies yields millions of incident-level observations, which we link to agency policy and staffing data, climate surveys, crime records, and neighborhood socioeconomic indicators. Supported by an interdisciplinary team including former policing executives, Urban Institute researchers, and Google engineers, the Center for Policing Equity’s NJD initiative has yielded a flexible, multilevel database that supports a broad variety of descriptive, predictive, and spatial analyses about race and policing.

Author

• Tracey Lloyd, The Urban Institute