today's video is going to be a little
bit different
it's probably going to be my least
watched video of the year
which is unfortunate because in my
opinion this would
probably be one of the most important
videos that i'm
i'm ever going to make if you watch the
news
and you listen to a lot of the rhetoric
that's out there regarding the police
everybody's saying that we need police
reform that police reform
is the most important thing that we can
do to improve our society
everything will be better if we only
reform the police
the question that i have is
what effect are you going to get with
these reforms
what's your goal and what are you going
to do that the police aren't already
doing
because everybody's acting like the
police have just been doing the exact
same thing
since the 1920s and they're running
around with tommy guns
just murdering people on the side of the
street
the reality is that is very far from the
truth
so what i'm going to do today is i've
actually pulled up the
annual reports from 2019
these are going to be the columbus
police annual report
and the columbus police use of force
annual report
i have to use the reports from 2019
because
so much stuff happened last year in 2020
those reports are not yet finished
i think for the purposes of this
discussion
these reports will be fine because much
of the data goes back
five years and there's even more
parts of the data that go back 10 years
what this
does it'll show you a trend and it
might actually be better to use the 2019
report rather than the 2020 report
because those numbers are going to be
significantly skewed because of
everything that happened last year
the first slide that i'd like to take a
look at is going to show
the total number of uses of force that
columbus police had on an annual basis
from 2015 to 2019
i think a lot of people would be
surprised to find out that in
2019 there were only 390
instances where officers had to use
force
and of those uses of force only 12
were with a use of firearm or a
officer-involved shooting
one thing that's really interesting
about this slide
is that you can see a downward trend
consistently
year over year in the number of
total reported uses of force
i think this information will surprise a
lot of people
there's a lot of talk politically and in
the media
that we need to change the police and
change the way they
act because they're using too much force
one thing people don't realize is that
the police are constantly changing their
tactics
in order to make this correction on
their own
this slide shows the number of calls for
service
columbus police officers respond to on
an annual basis
i'm going to go ahead and do the math
for you or tell you that the math has
already been done
in 2019 columbus police officers took a
little over half a million runs
i believe it's going to be in one of the
slides coming up it's somewhere around
538 000 calls for service
the slide we're looking at now is going
to show the total number of arrests made
year over year the orange part in the
color coded
is going to be part one arrest which are
classified as murder
rape robbery aggravated assault burglary
larceny and theft theft of vehicles
the part in the bottom which is blue
would be all other arrests
which would be your disorderly conducts
and stuff like that
in 2019 columbus police officers
arrested
26 hundred and eight people
i guess it would be more correct to say
they made
twenty six thousand eight hundred and
eight arrests
because a lot of those arrests were with
the same person
multiple times
the data on the next slide is going to
take the total number of
incidents that police officers in
columbus responded to
and it's going to divide that with the
number of uses of force
that were reported so according to the
data on this sheet
columbus police officers took in 2019
553 727
incidents or calls for service and
approximately one out of
1400 of those incidents
turned into a use of force that means
that
less than 0.07 percent of the time
officers are having a use of force with
a citizen
when they're dispatched on a call for
service
the slide i have for you now is going to
show
in the last 10 years the trend of
violent crime
and over the last 10 years violent crime
has been trending down
there's a very close correlation between
the downward trend
in violent crime and the downward trend
in police uses of force some people
might even say
that when violent crime is on the rise
police officers are going to
have more uses of force and when violent
crime is down
police officers are going to have less
uses of force
the data on this page shows the
breakdown
in police uses of force in the city of
columbus
along gender and racial lines
i think a stat that's going to jump out
to a lot of people
is that police officers in columbus have
had uses of force against
male blacks at a rate of 56 percent
while at male whites it was 41 percent
a lot of people are going to point to
that and say that that's a
disproportional response
because black men make a smaller than 56
percent
proportion of the population in the city
of columbus
when people point out the
disproportionate
response police officers have to
different races in the community
i would like to point out that
crime in the community is also
not spread out proportionally based on
the demographics of the city here is the
chart
this is from the 2020
homicide report which i have in my
possession
i wasn't able to find the 2019 report
online
but what this shows is the
suspects broken down by race
and with homicides the suspects are
80 percent black and 14 percent white
so when you take this figure and then
you look back at the previous slide
that showed police officers use force
56 percent of the time against black men
and 41 percent of time against white men
it can begin to show why that might
happen
the final thing that i would like to
show you is the i'll call this the
executive summary of the
use of force report this is where
the use of force experts weigh in and
give their opinion
on what happened the previous year and
then they're going to lay out the
recommendations for training
that are going to be implemented in the
following year
so in conclusion in 2019 officers used
force
390 times while responding to
five hundred and fifty three thousand
seven hundred and twenty seven
incidents which equates to one use of
force
for every one thousand sixteen incidents
only zero point seven percent of the
incidence resulted in a use of force
further 12 incidents or .002 percent
resulted in a officer discharging his
firearm at another person
annual training continues to focus on
various
aspects of use of force including
de-escalation and officer safety
recommendations revised policy requires
officers to intervene
when they witness excessive force the
training bureau
will incorporate scenarios to reinforce
this policy
training on punches kicks and impact
weapons strikes will continue to focus
on target acquisition specified training
is to reduce and eliminate injuries to
both the suspect
and the officers several firearm related
incidents have highlighted the need
for officers to be more cognizant of
their
area and behind the intended target
training will remind officers to be
aware of crossfire
and other people in the line of fire
de-escalation is now integrated into all
use of force training
in both classrooms and scenario based
learning environments
use of force on persons suffering from
mental illness
will be emphasized in 2019
there were 25 uses of force on mentally
ill people
though consistent in recent years
remains a focus of the division and the
training bureau
so now that you've had an inside look at
how
columbus division of police collects
their stats
and makes recommendations for future
years
i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you
learned
something and i'll talk to you soon
you