{"id":32124,"date":"2019-11-21T01:17:17","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T07:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/?p=32124"},"modified":"2019-11-21T01:17:17","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T07:17:17","slug":"qa-researchers-hope-data-can-help-tulsa-police-avoid-using-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/2019\/11\/21\/qa-researchers-hope-data-can-help-tulsa-police-avoid-using-force\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&#038;A: Researchers hope data can help Tulsa police avoid using force"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Following a number of high profile incidents of Tulsa police using force, a recent study found that race was not a significant factor in officers\u2019 decisions.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Cincinnati studied Tulsa to find ways to reduce the number of times police officers use force on civilians. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">StateImpact\u2019s Quinton Chandler asked Professor Michael Smith from the University of Texas at San Antonio how their findings can help Tulsa police in their encounters with the public. <\/span><\/p><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.simplecast.com\/47a50303-2fa4-40e4-9470-549bb2e4c956?dark=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"200px\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p><p><b>Quinton Chandler:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thanks for joining us, Professor Smith. Tell me about your recommendations for the Tulsa Police Department.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Professor Michael Smith:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That they expand their use of force reporting policy to capture what we know is to be the majority of force that&#8217;s used \u2013 low level kind of stuff. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the things that we didn&#8217;t really have information on that is important to know is, (were)\u00a0 &#8230; the citizens who were involved in these cases &#8230; under the influence of alcohol or drugs? <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Did they have mental health issues? These are known predictors of force in other studies and we didn&#8217;t really have the data to understand the impact of those factors in Tulsa. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So one of our recommendations (was) that the (Tulsa Police Department) improve the the breadth and the depth of their data that they collect. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think another important one that&#8217;s oftentimes overlooked is a recommendation that we made that they begin to capture instances where deadly force could have been used, but was not. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Police departments typically document pretty well instances where deadly force was used. But what we don&#8217;t know very much about are instances where it would have been authorized by law and policy, but the agency \u2013 the officers \u2013 didn&#8217;t use it. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That is a really important piece of information to know in order to compare against cases where deadly force was used. I think our final recommendation was, well, there are two of them. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One was the Tulsa PD begin to look at their canine policies (and) benchmark them against other sort of best practices for canine use nationally. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the same vein, our recommendation is that they sort of look at their use of force policy in training and again, sort of compare it to known best practices and to adjust their policy and training accordingly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Quinton Chandler:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tell me a little bit about the main goals of your broader research that Tulsa was\u00a0 filling a gap in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Professor Michael Smith:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So we have the narratives when officers use force. He or she writes a detailed narrative about what happened. So the officer says, &#8216;I did this and then the citizen did that, and then the citizen did this, and then I did that.&#8217; <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, we have these things broken down in great detail. So, if you think about the larger goals of the project: sort of understanding the factors that influence the use of force during arrests (and) in cases that (where) force was not used &#8230; understanding that sort of fine grained interaction between officers and citizens, we think is going to be a sort of a significant contribution to what we know about use of force nationally.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Quinton Chandler:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Once you&#8217;ve finished kind of breaking down these steps that lead up to force, and\u00a0 understanding what causes police using force on civilians, what&#8217;s the next big question?\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Professor Michael Smith:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I mean, there&#8217;s been considerable national attention paid to the use of deadly force by police in the last five years since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That sort of touched off, I think, a national conversation around the use of deadly force in particular and whether or not it&#8217;s driven by race. So, I think that&#8217;s an issue that continues to cry out for additional research. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The data that we&#8217;re suggesting that Tulsa begin to collect on instances where deadly force could have been used but was not is an important component to that research. Those kind of data don&#8217;t exist very, very frequently. <\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Certainly they don&#8217;t exist on a national level and most agencies still collect them either. But, it&#8217;s an important piece of that puzzle, right, of that deadly force puzzle in particular.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Quinton Chandler:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, thank you so much, Professor Smith. I appreciate you hopping on the call and talking about your research.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Professor Michael Smith:\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You&#8217;re more than welcome.<\/span><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent study found there wasn&#8217;t a relationship between race and Tulsa Police officers\u2019 decisions to use force.\u00a0Researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Cincinnati studied Tulsa to find ways to help Tulsa police in their encounters with the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":201,"featured_media":32157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"page-noFeature.php","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[1178,1183,1179,1182,1181],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32124"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32156,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32124\/revisions\/32156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}