Texas Law Enforcement Agencies Now Publishing Police-Involved-Shooting Data Online

The FBI's call for more data on officer-involved-shootings is welcome, if belated and somewhat half-hearted. For years, the federal government has been "collecting" this data via purely voluntary contributions by law enforcement agencies around the country. This is why the federal numbers on citizens killed by police officers is usually half that of any data collection put together by private parties.

A reader identifying himself only as "James" sends in the news that the state of Texas is taking a more "proactive" approach to the dissemination of officer-involved-shootings, thanks to a new law which went into effect on September 1st. The documentation on shootings is housed at the state Attorney General's website and contains single-page reporting forms uploaded by involved departments that include data on the victims as well as the circumstances surrounding the shootings.

Of more use, however, is the compilation of the data into a single spreadsheet -- again, an effort made by a private individual with no current ties to law enforcement.

[T]hat information has been made available via a new online spreadsheet compiled by Amanda Woog, a super-smart young attorney who clerked for Judge Cheryl Johnson at the Court of Criminal Appeals before working as a policy analyst for the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, where Grits first met her this spring. This fall, she took a post as a postdoctoral fellow at the UT-Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis; this database represents her first project in that new role.

Woog has thoughtfully put these two data points right next to each other:


Those concerned about the "Ferguson Effect" or the "War on Cops" will be happy to know that the "Injury or Death of PO [Police Officer]" tab in Woog's spreadsheet is still empty, nearly 60 days from the enactment of the reporting requirements.

This new information joins the other dataset tracking deaths at the hands of law enforcement -- custodial deaths. This data has been collected since 2005 and published for public inspection since 2011. (Again, as the result of legislation, not that famous Texas transparency we've never actually heard of")

Obviously, given the right amount of direction and incentives (i.e., not breaking state law), law enforcement entities canproduce information on officer-involved-shootings in a timely manner. But the nationaleffort has, so far, been strictly voluntary and overseen by a string of Attorneys General who seemingly could not have cared less about their obligations to the public, much less Congressional mandates.

But, even as we see efforts being made as the result of legislation, the execution still leaves a lot to be desired. That's where the public comes in. Law enforcement agencies may be dumping raw data, but we still need people like Amanda Woog to compile the information in an easily-readable format that doesn't require opening dozens of individual PDFs. This sort of unofficial partnership will be what's needed to make sense of the raw data turned over by law enforcement agencies. But the good news is, the data is finally starting to arrive.

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