Covering police violence and misconduct isn’t as straightforward as covering other forms of violence.
Part of the problem is that police departments generally don’t report crimes committed by their own officers. Another issue is that only some cities have independent oversight agencies that investigate misconduct and release their findings to the public. Departments also don’t include officer-involved shootings in the city’s overall shooting statistics.
That’s where independent researchers step in to track and publish data on police misconduct and violence.
One example is Bowling Green University’s police misconduct tracker. The database, which includes a range of crimes, including shootings, was created to “improve policing and inform the public about crimes committed by nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers across the United States,” according to its mission statement.
The tracker provides summary details not otherwise aggregated or publicly available for more than 20,000 criminal arrest cases involving nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers — including police officers, state troopers and deputy sheriffs — from 2005 to 2021. The 20,711 cases involve 16,758 individual officers arrested and were employed by 5,466 state, local and special law enforcement agencies located in 1,987 counties and independent cities in all 50 states and Washington, DC.
Users can search the database by location, crime or victim demographics. The website also has four video tutorials to help users navigate the data.
The location tool function provides an interactive map users can click to search and filter results by state, county, year of arrest, crime type, crime charge and outcome.
The crime tool sorts cases by a range of offenses including alcohol, assault, driving, drugs, fraud, gambling, homicide, larceny/theft, sexual offenses and offenses against the law enforcement agency (i.e, evidence tampering, fake police report, etc.)
The victim tool allows users to sort by different victim characteristics such as sex, race and ethnicity, occupation, age, injury status and relationship to the officer.
