White House said Thursday that it’s convinced 53 police departments around the country to participate in a program to publicize their arrest data, as part of an effort to help build trust between cops and the communities they serve.
Twenty-one police departments were on board when the program launched, so participation has more than doubled over the last year, officials said.
Those 53 police departments are just a fraction of the 18,000 departments across the country, but they include such major cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, Detroit and Cincinnati, and represent 41 million people, according to the White House.
“These commitments represent concrete steps toward rebuilding trust, and speak to a larger shift in the culture of policing that is at the core of the task force’s recommendations,” the White House said in a statement.
The program, called the Police Data Initiative, is a reform created by Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. The task force is a group of law enforcement and civil society leaders formed in 2014 after the unrest in Ferguson over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen by a white police officer.
Task Force members and the police chief of Austin, Texas, told reporters that the transparency program had generated 90 different categories of police records. That includes various arrest records, the number of police shootings, and the number of police that have been shot.
“We’re living at a time when the mistrust of the government is at a visible high … and the only way we’re going to overcome that is by being transparent,” said Art Acevedo, chief of police for Austin, Texas.
Roy Austin, deputy assistant to the president for urban affairs at the White House Domestic Policy Council, said examples of these different data sets are available for anyone to review at the PDI website, PoliceDataInitiative.org.
In addition, the White House plans to broadcast a web video featuring participating police officials talking about how the program works at 9 a.m. Friday at whitehouse.gov/live.
“Communities want to know and even have a right to know what their agencies are doing,” Austin said. “It is not the agencies data – it’s the communities’ data.”
The White House also announced that the Justice Department will help advance the work of these local police departments by providing technical assistance to make it happen, along with training of department employees on data collection and web posting.
Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women will also provide resources that help local jurisdictions open police and crime data to balance the value of the new transparency with the need to protect victim privacy.
