Their definition of contacts may be different than LAPD, but half a million works out to a bit less than 1 act of force per police office per year since there are something like 800k police officers in the US.
My question, again, is with all the violent criminals, people resisting arrest, people running from the police, mentally ill people who cannot cooperate, etc how is it that there is only 1 use of force per officer per year?
In 2009 there were about 14 million arrests.
If you assume half a million acts of force, that works out to about 1 act of force per 30 arrests. Those numbers sound more realistic.
That’s nation wide. According to the LAPD report, in 2009 there were 180K arrests, with 1761 UOF incidents. That’s 0.98%. In 2012, those figures were 1854 UOF for 150K arrests. That’s 1.2%.
1 out of 30 would be triple the rate published by the LAPD.
If two cops speak to 1 guy that’s 2 “contacts”, I bet.
LAPD has just under 10k officers so 1.5M/10K = 150 contacts per year per officer. That actually sounds low, like is that 1 every 2 days of work? WTF are these officers doing?
Not every contact is an arrest. I was having a donut and coffee at the counter someplace and some police officers stopped in for the same. We exchanged some casual conversation and one noticed my keys on the counter. I had a .44 magnum casing and bullet hanging from it (the hook thing went through the hole where a primer would have been. One asked me about it so I slid it down to him to check out. That was 2 police contacts, I guess. No big deal.
While the numbers seem reasonable, I’m also sure that they are “wrong”, in that “use of force” doubtless means “reported used of force”, and does not include incidents too trivial to record.
For example, putting handcuffs on someone. Not a use of force. Except that it hurts, and removes skin. Or putting your foot on someone you have handcuffed and prone. Not a use of force. Except that they get a skinned nose.
And then there is unreported force, like (in my case) breaking the tooth of a security guard. Or (in my friends case) “rough ride”
I leave out “Blue fever”, because I doubt that is common enough to distort the statistics. My point is just that there is a line between “manhandling” and “use of force”, and this is reporting one, not the other.
That is not a contact. They are talking about trackable statistics. Times when either a report was generated or an entry was made in the dispatch log. They are not guessing how many people an officer talks to on line to get coffee. An officer may talk to 20 people during his shift but the only official contacts would be the 2 cars he pulled over.
You would bet wrong. I have never seen it tracked that way. That would be one contact. For instance on a domestic call they might send 5 cops for a fight between 2 people until they know whats going on. That would be 2 contacts not 10.
I’m confused. You still haven’t explained how the LAPD’s number is abnormally low.
When you say, “all the violent criminals, people resisting arrest, people running from the police, mentally ill people who cannot cooperate, etc” you have not provided any frame of reference for how often this actually happens.
How often do violent criminals resist the police?
How often do people resist arrest?
How often do people run from police?
How often do police have to use force against mentally ill people?
Right now you are just assuming that these events must be frequent, therefore police violence must be frequent. If you had a statistic that said, “X events required the use of force, but only Y events were reported…” then you might have an argument.
As it stands, the only statistic I can glean from this discussion is the vague idea that incidents of force = 1 per officer per year. Therefore, if the LAPD has 10k officers, there should be 10K uses of force per year. The only way this discussion is valid is if we first prove that this statistic is valid.
Based on what? Your preconceived notions of how violent police work must really be?
These aren’t new data, just data presented in a different way. LAPD has been producing this type of data for many years. The UOF incidents have remained relatively consistent.
So I’m still wondering: Maybe Loach can discuss?
I witnessed a violent crime a few days ago. When I called 911, does that count as a contact?
When the police questioned some witnesses (including me), does that count as a contact?
Calling 911? No. You only talked to a civilian employee and not in person.
It really depends on the department. Many departments have activity logs where each officer has to account for all of their time. Other departments like mine don’t and a contact would only be counted if you made it into a report or a case note.
So to anyone who works in police work, is it common to only have to use force once a year or less? Meaning, only one person a year fights back, runs, is too mentally ill or high on drugs to cooperate, etc? Again, I’m not a cop but those numbers sound low. Is that what people in the field notice?
In the first sentence of my OP I said I wasn’t a cop and had no idea how it works.
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According to the LAPD statistics, each officer faces one of those situations less than once a year (I think once every 4 years, if there are about 2000 UOFs a year and 9000 officers). So again, is it common in places like LA for a suspect to resist, run, fight back, etc only once every 4 years? I never said police use of force was ‘frequent’, however each officer only having to use UOF once every 4 years sounds lower than I was expecting.
That’s almost certainly an average across the entire PD. Some may NEVER have UOF situations- meter maids, Public Affairs cops, cops in wealthy neighborhoods, etc… while others may see a relatively huge number of UOF situations, like say… a SWAT team or cops in bad neighborhoods.
I’ve been doing this 18 years. I don’t remember how many times I’ve had to use force. Probably a lot less than you would think. In the last 5 years plus as a detective not once.
Thank you for clearing that up; ignorance fought!