Rachel Harmon: observation

Transcript context

…Is it that they don’t want to do it? And is the bottleneck at the level of the individual police officer, the department, somewhere else? There are bottlenecks all along the way. If you think about what we traditionally demanded from police departments, the focus of the political demands on police departments have tended to focus on effectiveness in terms of public safety, or at least visible efforts towards producing public safety. There’s been a lot less focus on what kinds of harms policing is imposing. We do actually collect a lot of data from police departments, pretty effectively, with respect to crimes. We’ve had the uniform crime reports for almost 100 years, and we have standardized definitions of what those crimes are. Not perfect, but pretty good data from departments. There’s just a lot less interest in collecting data on the coercion that police officers do, like arrests. Arrests we use for the crime reports, but stops, uses of force, and the like. And it does cost something to collect that data, so you’d need individual officers to take time to do it. You’d need departments to supervise them, and then you’d need an effort to standardize the definitions and the formats so that we could actually use the data. If you think of body cams as a form of data on police behavior, would having a body cam on each officer be an effective way of improving the quality of conduct?…

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