Vera Institute of Justice

The use of arrests can have a multitude of detrimental individual, community, and agency level effects. (See Table 1.) These disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities in ways that exacerbate existing structural disadvantages, lack of economic opportunity, and material insecurity.^[]Robert J. Kane, "Compromised Police Legitimacy as a Predictor of Violent Crime in Structurally Disadvantaged Communities," Criminology 43, no. 2 (2005), 469-498; and Karen F. Parker, Brian J. Stults, and Stephen K. Rice, "Racial Threat, Concentrated Disadvantage and Social Control: Considering the Macro‐Level Sources of Variation in Arrests," Criminology 43, no. 4 (2005), 1111-1134. Although arrests are a necessary part of the justice system, police officers have discretion to take alternative, less invasive courses of action (such as applying de-escalation techniques or referring people to supportive services), which in many circumstances may be more appropriate for or beneficial to the individual person, community, officer, and agency.^[]Rachel A. Harmon. "Why Arrest?" Michigan Law Review 115, no. 3 (2016), 307-364. Yet few formal alternatives to arrest currently exist.

Researchers, practitioners, and advocates alike need information on the dynamics of policing to better understand how the overreliance on arrests drives mass incarceration and deepens other social inequities. But unless one knows how to navigate the multitude of public datasets available, there is no easy way to find and interpret data on the basic components of American policing—such as how often people are arrested, who police are arresting and why, or whether community members collaborate with and report crimes to the police.

Although police agencies and the federal government invest significant time and resources into collecting policing data, the data is not easily accessible, centrally located, or available in a user-friendly format.^[]To date, several resources exist to aid in the analysis of policing data, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Arrests and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) calculators; the FBI’s Persons Arrested, Clearances, and Offenses Known to Law Enforcement Tables; and the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, among others. These tools are beneficial in that they are efficient, relatively easy to use, and often customizable, but they remain limited in the ways described above and most notably are decentralized. Files are often large and require a great deal of cleaning, restructuring, merging, statistical knowledge, and computing power to analyze. In addition, there is no simple way to compare data across locations, see information from agencies that only share partial data, or calculate arrest rates among specific demographic groups. For data-savvy researchers, this is technically possible, but time intensive.

For other stakeholders, such as police chiefs, advocates, the media, and community members—who may want to learn about how arrests affect their communities or how the implementation of a particular policy changed arrest trends over time—this is a much harder task. As a result, it can be difficult to lift the veil off policing practices for both community members and police practitioners alike. The result is that those who do not have the time or technical expertise to go through reams of data often only have access to high-level information—such as overall crime rates—to make decisions.

At a time when confidence in the police is low—particularly within communities of color—and in the wake of high profile incidents of police violence, increased transparency and access to information about police practices is more important than ever.^[]Police Assessment Resource Center, “Seattle Police Department,” https://perma.cc/Y27S-QFCC; Jacey Fortin, “Jeff Sessions Limited Consent Decrees. What About the Police Departments Already Under Reform?” New York Times, November 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/us/sessions-consent-decrees-police.html; and U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2015), https://perma.cc/BHZ4-MPXN. Moreover, access to good data is necessary in order to build an evidence-base for practices that are intended to make communities safer—including those that serve as an off-ramp from the justice system (and thus incarceration), as well as those that strengthen and improve trust between police and the communities they serve.