Officials in Tennessee and Mississippi Investigated 58 Officer-Involved Homicides. We Only Know What Happened to the Officers in 12 of Those Cases.

Earlier in April, the Guardian published an article finding that about one in six officers in the United States who use lethal force against people are being found justified without anyone in the public being notified about it. They also found that the investigations in another 30% of officer-involved deaths from the first three months of 2015 were still under review more than a year later.

This article prompted me to update the judicial review statistics of all incidents in the Lethal Force Database. Over the 19 months of data that I've collected from January 2014 through July 2015, I've found the final disposition in a majority of officer-involved homicide incidents, 52%, or 851 out of 1631 incidents. Of those 851 people killed by police, the police officer has been officially cleared of all criminal charges in 834 of those deaths. Only 17 homicides by police officers from January 2014 through July 2015 have resulted in criminal charges against the officer, which is a rate of about 1%.



But I don't know what has become of the investigation into the other 48% of the lethal force incidents from January 2014 through July 2015. Some of these 780 lethal force incidents are still under investigation, and some of them have been secretly cleared by district attorneys or grand juries. (It is also quite likely that I've missed the public announcement of no wrongdoing by the officers involved for several of these incidents.)

In some places, many years can pass from the time an officer kills a person to the time the investigation concludes. Philip Stinson, a professor at Bowling Green State Univerisity who has been tracking officer-involved shootings for a long time, asserted in the Guardian article that district attorneys are motivated to draw out and hide the review of these incidents not because the level of interest is low, but rather because the level of interest is high.

“District attorneys typically don’t want to prosecute police officers if they can avoid it,” said Stinson. “There is an inherent conflict of interest in that they have to rely on their local law enforcement colleagues at other times, so they’re reluctant to deal with these cases.” Amid increased pressure on prosecutors from some quarters of the public to act against officers for excessive force incidents, however, often “they’re not going to issue a press release saying we declined to prosecute”, said Stinson.

The process, and the transparency, of determining whether or not an officer's use of force is justified varies from state to state and from county to county.  There is a strong culture of transparency in some places like Oregon and Colorado, and there is an equally strong culture of obfuscation in other places, like Tennessee and Mississippi.

Using the data I've gathered in the Lethal Force Database, I decided to create some kind uniformly-applied metric to measure each state's judicial transparency, unimaginatively called the Judicial Transparency Ranking.* It combines the percentage of cases known to have been cleared by a district attorney, grand jury, or other type of binding reviewing entity, with the length of time it took to complete the investigation.

Lethaldb.com Judicial Transparency Rank	State	Pct of cases known to be cleared	Avg. time for judicial review (months)
1	Oregon	100%	1.2
2	Colorado	95%	2.8
3	Wisconsin	100%	3.6
4	Iowa	91%	2.6
5	Nebraska	100%	4.6
6	Utah	82%	2.7
7	Michigan	68%	2.8
8	Arkansas	58%	1.1
9	Ohio	70%	4.6
10	Virginia	75%	5.7
11	Kansas	71%	5.8
12	Oklahoma	56%	2.8
13	South Carolina	62%	4.7
14	North Carolina	55%	3.3
15	Pennsylvania	61%	5
16	Georgia	77%	9.3
17	Washington	56%	5.1
18	Minnesota	69%	9
19	Massachusetts	57%	8.7
20	Nevada	68%	12.2
21	Indiana	40%	3.3
22	Kentucky	46%	5.8
23	Missouri	46%	6.4
24	New Jersey	50%	7.9
25	Illinois	36%	3.4
26	Florida	40%	5
27	Alabama	41%	5.9
28	California	51%	10.3
29	New York	32%	4
30	Texas	37%	6.4
31	Maryland	38%	6.8
32	New Mexico	37%	6.6
33	West Virginia	33%	5
34	Louisiana	36%	6.9
35	Arizona	38%	8.4
36	Tennessee	23%	3.3
37	Mississippi	23%	5.6

By this standard, Oregon is the most transparent state in the country. Of the 27 lethal force incidents that occurred in the state between January 2014 and July 2015, it is public knowledge that officers were cleared of all charges in all 27 of them. Oregon officials proactively released this information to the public and the media at the conclusion of investigations, which took an average of just over a month to complete.

Colorado, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska round out the top five. Over 90% of officer-involved homicide investigations in each of these states has been concluded, and decisions publicly dispersed, whether from district attorneys or grand juries, in all of those.

By contrast, the least transparent state is Mississippi. Only five of the 22 lethal force incidents occurring in the state from January 2014 through July 2015 are known to have been cleared, usually by a grand jury. This is less than a quarter of all officer-involved homicides.

The Guardian found that the phenomenon of non-public disclosures of decisions to declare officers' actions justified was, for the first three months of 2015, more likely to occur in Arizona than in any other state. Indeed, Arizona, which had more officer-involved homicides in total and per capita than all but three other states, is also in the bottom five in the Judicial Transparency Ranking, just in front of Tennessee and Mississippi, and just behind West Virginia and Louisiana. Even including the information made public by the Guardian about Arizona's non-public disclosures, fewer than 40% of Arizona's officer-involved homicides are known to have been cleared.

So why is it important for officials to make these investigations public? I have explored this topic in this post about district attorneys and their duty to make transparent the investigations into officer-involved homicides. Go ahead and read it!



*Methodology: I have searched the internet (and continue to search) for public information regarding the investigation and judicial review of each of the incidents included in the Lethal Force Database. If a report from the media or directly from the district attorney is released, I record the number of months, rounded to the nearest week, that elapsed from the time the incident occurred to the time the district attorney cleared the officer of criminal charges. Sometimes information will be released that will indicate that a particular incident had been cleared at some time in the past (such as in the Guardian article about non-public justification decisions, or California's Open Justice Data Portal), in which case the time elapsed is recorded as from the time the incident occurred to the time the media first indicated that the incident had been cleared. Incidents deemed within police policy by an independent investigation or a police review authority (such as the Independent Police Review Authority of Chicago or the Los Angeles Police Commission) do not count, unless the review authority has the power to clear criminal charges against the officer. The Judicial Transparency Ranking includes only states with at least 10 lethal force incidents in the Lethal Force Database, thus excluding 13 states and the District of Columbia. The states are ranked by a factor that is proportional to the percentage of incidents known to be cleared and inversely proportional to the time elapsed to complete the investigation.

Slightly Better Looking Data Now Available!

This is a quick post to say that I have pretty significantly upgraded the state page at lethaldb.silk.co.  I have made a data page for each state that shows a list of all people who have been killed by police in that state, as well as a map of the locations of the killings and a few other facts.

I have also included data from July 2015 into the database, so now there are 19 months of data to explore. You should check it out!