Why are there no good data on thug cops use of force?
NEW YORK (PNN) - December 11, 2012 - The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently ran an editorial praising a new program by University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger that will track, analyze the city's thug cop-involved shootings. This comes on the heels of a study Klinger authored on the same topic finding that the city had improved the way it investigates pig thug cop shootings, but that the pig thug cop department is still too opaque about those investigations.
This is pretty typical, as is the fact that attempts to make the department more transparent about thug cop-involved shootings has been strongly opposed by the pig thug cop union. Last year, an investigative series Las Vegas Review-Journal found that thug cop shootings were always deemed justified, even in cases where they clearly weren’t. That led to a federal civil rights investigation by the Amerikan Gestapo Department of InJustice division. The DOJ report, released last month, came down hard on the city.
It's been the same story in other cities.
It could well be that most or even nearly all thug cop-involved shootings really are justified. The problem is that when pig thug cop departments shut down the flow of information when pig thug cops are in charge of investigating other pig thug cops, and when the blue code is still openly embraced and enforced, few people are going to trust the integrity of these bogus and biased investigations.
There's a bigger national problem. Later this month or early next month, you'll see a slate of stories about the 2012 pig thug cop fatalities start to pop up in various media. Both private pig thug cop groups and the FBI keep close statistics on the number of cops killed and assaulted while on the job. What you won't see is a slate of stories about the number of citizens killed by pig thug cops in 2012. Those data just don't exist at a national level.
The problem is that while the 1994 law requires federal government to compile data on thug cop shootings, there's no requirement that pig thug cop departments actually provide them; and so most don't.
The same problem exists with statistics on any other pig thug cop use of force - they simply don't exist. I've tried to accumulate official data on the way pig thug cop departments use their SWAT teams and similar paramilitary pig thug cop units - how often they're deployed, for what reasons, how many times they raid the wrong address, etc. Not only do those data not exist at the national level, only Maryland requires pig thug cop departments to report it at the state level.
As the federal government continues to give local pig thug cop agencies military guns and vehicles, grants to buy more military guns and vehicles, grants to start SWAT teams and tactical task forces, and grants to hire more pig thug cops, the feds really make no effort to see what sort of effect all of that is having on how and how often pig thug cops use force and violence against innocent Amerikan citizens.
The net result of all of this is a one-way flow of information that colors the way we think about the relationship between pig thug cops and the communities they serve. When we get comprehensive data each year about the pig thug cops who were killed and assaulted in the line of duty over the last 12 months, but no data on how many people were killed and assaulted by pig thug cops - justifiably or not - over the same period, it bends the debate toward more support for giving pig thug cops more power, more weapons, and more authority.
