Daly City launches site to report use-of-force data

The Daly City Police Department has launched a new web-based tool to publish its use-of-force data.

On Monday, the department went live with its “Force Analysis Data” page on the city’s website.

The page features five interactive dashboards that allow users to research use-of-force data by time and date, location, type of force used, as well as the gender, race, age and suspects’ city of residence, among other things.

Sgt. Sean Begley said:

“I think that a lot of times the public obviously wants the information and if you don’t give it to them, people start filling in the blanks with what might be misinformation.”

Begley said:

“We don’t have anything to hide so we might as well put it out there for the public to see.”

One of the things the public can see is that, in 2018, the department’s officers used force 111 times, according to the website. Out of those incidents, officers used force on Latinos 42 percent of the time, on African Americans 35 percent of the time, on Caucasians 14 percent of the time and on Asians 9 percent of the time.

Also, 84 percent of the incidents in which officers used force involved men, 46 percent of the incidents involved people between the ages of 18 and 29, 58 percent of suspects were from out of town and 8 percent were transients, according to the site.

During that period, officers used deadly force in about 3 percent of the incidents.

The new page, which will be updated annually, was built and launched by Police Strategies LLC for $16,500. The money came out of a grant from the California Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Fund, according to a report the department gave the Daly City City Council on July 22. The $7,500 annual, ongoing cost to maintain and update the site will come out of the department’s operating budget.

The data accessible by the public is scrubbed of any specific information about officers’ or suspects’ identities, but according to the City Council report. the department will have access to more detailed reports in order to:

“[D]etermine if there are needs, policy changes, or employee intervention situations required.”

The only other Bay Area city with such a tool is San Jose, Begley said.

Daly City’s police officers have been among the least likely to use force compared to the region’s other law enforcement agencies, with the city’s rate of such incidences measured at about 1 per 100,000 people between 2016 and 2017, according to the Bay Area Equity Atlas, a website that tracks the metrics of inequality.

The city’s new web page can be accessed here:
http://www.dalycity.org/City_Hall/Departments/police_department/community_resources/Force_Analysis_Data.htm

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