The chase sped across Alameda County last November, an alleged car thief leading cops through the streets of East Bay to Oakland and into San Francisco, where his ride finally ran out of gas. A motion-activated surveillance camera in an alley nearby recorded what happened next: Two Alameda County sheriff’s deputies pummeled the driver, Stanislav Petrov, striking him with their fists and batons at least 30 times, stopping only when other officers arrived.
Petrov was sent to the hospital with broken hands, a concussion and grisly lacerations. He was being held in federal custody this summer on unrelated charges. The two deputies were each charged with a trio of felonies, including assault with a deadly weapon, six months later.
The incident provoked an outcry, the surveillance video drawing comparisons to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers after a car chase in 1991.
It also highlighted a gap that lawmakers and civil rights activists were already by then hoping to close: Despite the horrifying footage of Petrov’s beating, for all of the attention it brought to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, neither officials nor the public could know whether the incident was an outlier or part of a broader pattern. Although California, like many other states, tracked how often officers killed or lost their lives in the line of duty, as well as how often prisoners died in police custody, the state did not record non-fatal uses of force.
That’s changing this year: Under a new online system launched Thursday — the first of its kind in the nation — every law enforcement agency in California eventually will be required to report not just when their officers have a lethal encounter but how often officers or civilians, like Petrov, are left with “serious bodily injuries” like concussions, broken bones or major lacerations. Departments also will have to report when their officers open fire, even if the shots miss.
Comparatively more minor injuries, like bruising, burns from a Taser-style stun gun, or irritation from pepper spray, will not have to be reported.
[READ: Black Men May Have Legitimate Reason to Flee Police, Mass. High Court Finds]
State Attorney General Kamala Harris, whose office is overseeing the digital reporting system, calls it a first step — one she hopes will be come a national model.
“As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force,” Harris said in a statement.
The new reporting system — named URSUS for California’s state animal, the grizzly bear — is being introduced amid ongoing debate about race, law enforcement, the relationship between residents and police, and the use of force by officers. It’s an outgrowth of a bill introduced in December 2014 by State Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, a Democrat representing Pomona and three other cities east of Los Angeles. He was motivated both by the deaths of civilians at the hands of police — men like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and Eric Garner, whose deaths incited protests from coast to coast — and the slayings of 16 police officers in 2014.
“Officers are dying, we’re having civilians dying, something needs to be done,” Rodriguez says. “Shouldn’t we be tracing these incidents? The only way to wrap our arms around it is to understand it and see how we can fix it.”
Police killed 130 people in California last year, according to an analysis of state data by the Sacramento Bee. The Guardian pegged the number higher, at 211. Either figure ranks as the greatest total in the U.S. About 43 percent of those killed were Latino, 30 percent were white and 20 percent were black. Six officers and two K-9 unit dogs died in the line of duty.
Nationwide, officers used force — or threatened to do so — in about 1.5 percent of their interactions with civilians, according to surveys by the U.S. Justice Department in 2002, 2005 and 2008. But detailed statistics about the kinds of encounters where that most often occurred, and against whom, were not recorded. Only 3 percent of the nation’s roughly 18,000 police departments report their use of force.
[ALSO: N.C. Governor Pat McCrory Declares State of Emergency as Violence Ensues]
“Of all the arrests and detentions involving police, how many of them result in a use of force? How many of them result in a serious injury? How many of them result in a firearms discharge? We can’t answer that question today,” says Robert Lehner, police chief for Elk Grove, California, a city of about 100,000 outside Sacramento. “That’s really important for the public to know, but it’s really important for us to know: It gets to what our crises are, what kind of tools and equipment we need.”
Use-of-force data from the URSUS program will be added to Open Justice, an online data portal launched by the California Department of Justice last September. The website already houses charts and reports on killings by police, deaths in custody, crime and clearance rates, assaults on officers, and deaths in the line of duty. The reports from URSUS will be added as part of an annual analysis, with charts and raw data included.
The Justice Department has largely resisted calls to set a nationwide standard for use of force by police, instead leaving it up to states and local agencies. Roughly three-quarters of the nation’s police departments employ 25 or fewer officers, and about half have only 10 or fewer officers, leaving little manpower to comply with a new federal records requirement. Different departments also have conflicting views of “force”: While some consider pointing a firearm a use of force, for example, others do not.
“One of the things we are focusing on at the Department of Justice is not trying to reach down from Washington and dictate to every local department how they should handle the minutia of record keeping,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a conversation with NBC journalist Chuck Todd at the Washington Ideas Forum last fall.
California’s approach with URSUS has won broad — if cautious — support from a range of policing, legal and civil rights groups, including the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents LAPD officers, the California Public Defenders Association, and think tank the Center for Policing Equity. The platform’s promise seems twofold: potentially illuminating whether police or certain departments disproportionately use force with particular groups or situations, and which kinds of encounters pose the greatest threats to police.
[MORE: Chicago Drives Uptick in Murders; National Crime Rate Stays Near “Historic Lows”]
In Elk Grove, for example, which has tracked its officers’ use of force since 2008, the department has used the data to single out officers who may need training refreshers or courses on de-escalation techniques, Chief Lehner says.
But groups also caution URSUS will not be a panacea: While California law sets some standards for defining which injuries are “serious,” it also leaves room for interpretation, potentially allowing some departments to downgrade — or be accused of downgrading — certain injuries.
The reporting requirement, set by Assembly Bill 71 and signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown last fall, also lacks enforcement measures: Departments that don’t submit data may receive a phone call or letter from the attorney general’s office but little else, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Justice acknowledges.
“My concern is that this approach might be viewed by many as sufficient, as a sop to activists and watchdogs that will have legislators and other people with oversight rest on their oars,” says Jody David Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in criminal law, as well as stereotypes and prejudice. “It may be a good first step, but sadly sometimes the first step is the only step.”
More from U.S. News
Black Men May Have Reason to Run from Police, Massachusetts High Court Finds
Nation’s Biggest Police Union Endorses Trump
Chicago Drives Uptick in Murders; National Crime Rate Stays Near ‘Historic Lows’
California Launches First Statewide System to Track Police Use of Force originally appeared on usnews.com
