Might the officer be biased in his or her take? Of course! Every witness is biased. When it comes to police shootings, the officer’s perspective is an essential, but not singular, component of that story. And regardless, as a guy who also works with data for a living, I’m always after the most reliable and objective data points available.īut in the real world we must deal with what we have.
Absent other evidence, and based on the police’s history of lying, it’s just too difficult to study data that’s primarily based on the word of police.Īs a cop, I don’t agree. Some excellent journalists raised an issue: In many cases, they said, the cops simply can not be trusted. Ultimately and in short, we used the data that was available-specifically, in most cases, the testimony of the police officer involved. After all, what good is data if the source is bad?
In studying the killings by police of unarmed people in the United States-especially in light of media coverage that is overwhelmingly skeptical of the American cops’ take on things-one of the most important things we needed to consider was where we would get information and how we can know that it is truthful.
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