Towards a National Police Accountability Database

Now, there is intense, if uneven, pressure for prosecutors to indict police officers in the wake of high-profile killings of Black, Latinx and Indigenous people. However, there is as yet no centralized public database that tracks how prosecutors respond to alleged racially-biased misconduct of their law enforcement colleagues at scale. In this talk, I use a case study from King County, WA to introduce a new data source: prosecutorial declination memos. Moving forward, I will build on this preliminary work to create the first national database that publicizes how police killings, use-of-force incidents and in-custody deaths are sanctioned, justified, or ignored by prosecutors in courts across the United States. This database is designed to answer pressing but as-yet-unknown questions about law enforcement accountability, such as: how many police killings result in criminal charges filed against officers by prosecutors? What racial, regional, economic or legal factors impact the decision to pursue criminal charges against police? Are these deciding factors fair, or does racial bias undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement? These questions are pressing for a variety of audiences, from social scientists and law scholars to policy-makers, legal practitioners, advocates, journalists and the democratic public at large.

Speaker: Dr. Kayla Bourne, UC Berkeley

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