In an effort to increase transparency, the Phoenix Police Department released a new website that automatically displays updated statistics regarding officer-involved shootings within the department.
“…the dashboard is an organized visual representation of the data that has already been publicly released so far through media releases, social media and on our website,” Phoenix Police Sergeant Vince Lewis said.
The website shows visual data on a dashboard comparing the number of officer involved shootings from 2017 to 2018 relative to the setting in which they occurred.
According to the dashboard’s statistics, the number of officer-involved shootings has nearly doubled since last year. In 2017, there were 21 incidents, there have been 41 in 2018 so far.
Considering the alarming increase, the issue of police violence has not gone unnoticed in Phoenix. A spike in police-involved shootings is certain, but data alone does not explain why this is.
Jamaar Williams, a member of Phoenix Metro Black Lives Matter, believes the website is only validating an eminent problem rather than finding a solution to fix it.
“I find it very interesting that the Phoenix Police Department’s definition of transparency is to give us colored bar graphs of things were seeing every day in our communities,” Williams said. “We already know that the Phoenix police is shooting people in record numbers, and we didn’t need transparency to see that. We need transparency and understanding what the Phoenix Police Department is doing about it.”
Due to the large pools of data on the dashboard, certain patterns may be identified to further bring light to an issue.
“Although each incident is investigated individually, one can see in the data that the vast majority of incidents involved armed subjects,” Lewis said.
When a suspect is armed, Lewis notes, police must make split-second decisions in the face of danger.
“This is where training and experience, combined with Arizona law and Phoenix Police policy, will influence officers’ decisions when life is threatened and force is used, deadly force included,” Lewis explained.
Williams does not buy the claim that the elevated amount of officer-involved shootings in Phoenix are because of those being shot at.
“The police’s response is to say that, for some reason, residents of the City of Phoenix are more violent than any other major metropolitan area in the United States, that doesn’t make any sense,” Williams said.
While speculation about the reason for the rise in officer-involved shootings continues, Phoenix Police hope to reach a more definitive answer in the future.
“The sociological questions about the why behind the spike in occurrences will hopefully be answered by the study currently being conducted by the National Police Foundation and Arizona State University,” Lewis said.
According to Lewis, these two organizations will work together to deeply analyze the data and “to provide some answers to the ‘why’s’ behind the numbers.”
In order to effectively combat the issue of officer involved shootings, Williams believes a serious cultural change is necessary.
“We need to start fostering a culture that fights back against this narrative that police can do no wrong. Police are people too, they don’t have the moral high ground,” Williams said. “When we lose sight of that, that’s how we have the situation that Phoenix is in.”
Williams also believes police should be held accountable by an organization independent of themselves.
“We need people outside of that world who have an outside perspective judging who should be disciplined and who shouldn’t,” Williams said. “You can’t have police policing themselves.”
Since the dashboard’s release on Wednesday, the data within it has already changed.
The last officer-involved shooting within the Phoenix Police Department occurred Thursday afternoon in west Phoenix, 16 days after an officer-involved shooting in Glendale.
The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association commented on the latest officer involved shooting on their Facebook page: “Thankfully none of our officers were injured in yet another encounter with violent suspect who left them with no option other than to use lethal force.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated Dec. 8 to include a link to the police department website.
Contact the reporter at nludden@asu.edu
