Solving the Problem of Police Data: The National Justice Database

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

Scholarship on police behavior has long been hampered by the lack of standardized data. The Center for Policing Equity created the National Justice Database (NJD) with funding from the National Science Foundation and private philanthropic partners in 2014 to begin filling this knowledge gap. By standardizing secondary data on police vehicle stops, pedestrian stops, and use of force, and merging those with psychological surveys of officers and policy analyses, the NJD provides a robust structure within which to explore the causes and consequences of police behavior. To date, the NJD has received commitments to share data from police departments that protect roughly one-third of the nation’s population. The four presentations on this panel describe the process of engaging police stake-holders, the data archiving protocol, some of the analytic processes, and the conceptual framework for the NJD policy analysis. A new partnership with Google and Google data engineers allows the NJD to integrate additional public datasets and provide analyses to participating departments in a fraction of the time.

Sub Unit

• Area VIII. Policing / 45. Police Strategies, Interventions and Evaluations

Division of Special Interest

• Divisions of Special Interest / Division of Policing

Individual Presentations

• Building a Data Tool for Justice - Phillip Atiba Goff, Center for Policing Equity; Christopher Burbank, Center for Policing Equity; Krista Dunn, Center for Policing Equity; Christopher Mebius, Center for Policing Equity; Kat Amano, Center for Policing Equity; Meredith Gamson Smiedt, Center for Policing Equity

• An Intra-Industry, Inter-Agency Policy Review Framework for Law Enforcement - Jack Glaser, University of California, Berkeley; Amanda Charbonneau, University of California, Berkeley; Joseph Broadus, University of California, Berkeley

• Building a National Database of Police Stops and Use of Force - Tracey Lloyd, The Urban Institute

• Understanding Police Use of Force: Does Measurement Matter? - Amanda Geller, New York University; Phillip Atiba Goff, Center for Policing Equity; Tracey Lloyd, The Urban Institute; Steven Raphael, University of California, Berkeley; Jack Glaser, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Phillip Atiba Goff, Center for Policing Equity