Phoenix Publishes Officer Involved Shooting Dashboard
The Phoenix Police Department saw its 41st officer involved shooting of the year on Thursday night, the highest since at least 2011.
It came the same week the city started publishing data on a new online dashboard with officer involved shooting information dating back to Jan. 1, 2017.
Officer involved shooting numbers had been available if you asked for them, but now detailed datasets are online, joining police data on crimes and calls for service.
Phoenix Police Department Spokesman Sgt. Vince Lewis said the project has been in the works since the middle of October, and the hope is to have it completed by the end of the year.
“We had noticed about midway through the year that there was a upward trend in officer-involved shootings in Phoenix,” Lewis said. “We thought it was important to ramp up this project just so we can get all the data out there.”
The data is housed in the larger Phoenix Open Data Portal, which has datasets for several city departments.
The community activist group Poder in Action called the new dashboard a “win” in their campaign for more transparency.
“The creation of this public dashboard came after years of Black and Brown community members demanding accountability and transparency from the Phoenix Police Department,” Poder in Action member Michael Ingram stated in a press release.
Phoenix has already far surpassed last year’s total of 21 officer involved shootings. Fourteen of 2017's officer involved shootings were fatal. This year, 19 of 41 have been fatal.
The Phoenix PD, in partnership with the National Police Foundation and Arizona State University, has been looking into why the city has seen such a spike in these incidents.
“There’s a sociological element that we are hoping that this ASU study will help us answer,” Lewis said.
The police department also does a tactical review mid-year and at years-end to determine how training should be adjusted.
