Danger and Data Collection in American Policing

Empirical evidence is critical for democratic policing. Data are paramount for the effective governance of the police. This has become especially clear as police officer-involved homicides have gained national attention in the last half-decade. In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, scholars and activists quickly identified and decried the lack of reliable national data on police use of force. Media outlets like The Washington Post intervened, establishing a dataset on all civilians shot and killed by police that has created, for the first time ever, close-to-accurate data on the lethal dangers to civilians from encounters with the police. Yet danger in policing is not just present for civilians that the police encounter. Officers themselves are in danger while carrying out their duties. While many other jobs are statistically more dangerous than policing, including commercial fishing, logging, and roofing, policing is unique in the potential for intentional assault by civilians that officers sometimes face while performing their jobs. Because of this, in the public imagination and in the views of officers themselves, being a police officer is one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States. Many researchers have shown that a preoccupation with danger is a central – if not the central – element of police occupational culture.As officers carry out their various duties as law enforcers, maintainers of order, and social service providers, however, they experience critical incidents from a much wider variety of sources than just intentional violence from civilians. Officers respond to gruesome traffic accidents and crime scenes; they investigate child abuse; they encounter individuals in the worst moments of their lives or who are suffering from severe mental illnesses. All of these encounters create stress that, accumulated over time, can and does place officers at an elevated risk of mental illness (such as PTSD and depression) and can lead to malada