CT Media Can't Get a Police "Use of Force" Report

 Or rather, they can't get an accurate one:

The first analysis of how Connecticut’s police officers use force in the course of their duties provides some insights, but officials on Thursday warned about drawing conclusions because of a lack of standards in data collection and incomplete participation among police departments.

The report, issued by the University of Connecticut’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, collected data from nearly 1,300 use-of-force reports submitted by 60 police departments across the state for incidents in 2019 and 2020.

Connecticut is only the second state in the country, after New Jersey, to start collecting and independently analyzing use-of-force reports from all of its police departments.

But in a presentation to the Police Officer Standards and Training Council before the report was released to the public on Thursday, the institute’s director, Ken Barone, cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from the data or trying to compare departments because there was no standardized form to submit information when the program started in 2019. 

So while some departments reported use-of-force incidents in which someone was just handcuffed, others reported incidents only when officers drew their guns or activated their Tasers, Barone said.

“Data collection is inexcusably deficient” to draw conclusions, the report states. “The data must be much more reliable and comprehensive before it can show any causal relationships based on race, ethnicity, gender, underlying behavior, or crime rates that might identify and explain any trends and disparities.”

Barone said a new law that went into effect July 1 of this year established a uniform report that all departments must submit. The hope is that, with a uniform reporting system, the data will be cleaner to analyze, he said.

Nevertheless CT Mirror was able to find some interesting things.