Police Scorecard For Marietta And Washington County

MARIETTA, OH — Police departments in Marietta, and Washington County were among those analyzed for the newest Police Scorecard, a data-based project founded by data scientist, policy analyst, and activist Samuel Sinyangwe.

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The Police Scorecard launched in 2019 and previously only tracked police and sheriff’s departments in California. The project released its first nationwide analysis Wednesday.

The scorecard is an “ongoing project,” according to its website, and will be updated as new information becomes available.

Policing in the United States has come under intense scrutiny in the last year following a series of high-profile deaths at the hands of police. The data looked at the last seven years, in that time the Marietta Police Department has had no killings by police. The Washington County Sheriff's Office only had one such incident.

The Police Scorecard calculates levels of police violence, accountability, racial bias, and other outcomes for more than 16,000 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, covering nearly 100 percent of the U.S. population.

The database was compiled using information pulled from research literature as well as input from activists and experts in the field. It also used data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Annual Survey of Jails, the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of State and Local Government Finances, and the California Department of Justice's OpenJustice database.

Researchers scored public safety agencies based on a set of “common principles,” according to the database. Those principles are:

• The agency should prioritize addressing serious threats to public safety, not arresting or incarcerating people for low-level offenses.
• The agency should avoid the use of force, especially deadly force, to the greatest extent possible.
• When people come forward to report misconduct by employees of the agency, it should result in some form of accountability.
• When people call on the agency to solve the most serious crimes — often those resulting in death — they should be able to trust that agency to find the person responsible.
• The agency should accomplish these goals in ways that are not biased or discriminatory.
• The agency should accomplish these goals at the lowest cost possible, minimizing the financial burden on communities.

Using these principles, researchers looked at available data from more than 13,200 municipal police departments and 2,800 county sheriff departments.

Agencies ultimately were given a score between 0 and 100 percent — a score of 0 percent represents agencies with the worst outcomes and 100 percent represents those with the best. Departments received a higher score if they made fewer arrests for low-level offenses, used less force during arrest, spent less money on policing, and upheld civilian complaints of police misconduct more often than other agencies.

Read more about the Police Scorecard’s methodology.

Here’s how Marietta scored on the following outcomes:

• Police funding: The data was incomplete, but the funding score was low for both the Washington County Sheriff's Office and for the Marietta Police.
• Police accountability: The data for police accountability was too low to come to any reasonable conclusion for either the Washington County Sheriff's Office and the Marietta Police Department.
• Police violence: Based on data available, the Marietta Police scored well for police violence. The data was too incomplete to make any type of definitive statement about the Washington County Sheriff's Office.
• Approach to law enforcement: The data showed that the Marietta Police Department's approach to law enforcement was better than the national average. The Washington County Sheriff's Office's approach showed that they were even better. To be fair, the Marietta Police Department had some holes in the data here.

The initial analysis of data found that policing outcomes vary greatly by state and city.

Based on the methodology used to score each department, Nevada and Georgia had among the lowest average scores, while Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had among the highest average scores.

Compiling the data also helped researchers make a series of conclusions about the state of policing across America. Here’s a brief look at what they discovered:

Police continue to hide substantial amounts of data from the public: In 36 states, laws restrict or prohibit agencies from making these records public.

Policing also differs substantially by city: Police departments in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, and El Paso, Texas, had among the highest overall scores. By contrast, police departments in Chicago, Long Beach, and Kansas City had among the worst outcomes.

Police are making fewer arrests for low-level offenses: Two-thirds of all arrests reported in 2019 were for low-level offenses, which include loitering, disorderly conduct, substance use, sex work, and other offenses that are not crimes against people or property.

As arrests decline, racial disparities persist: Black persons were arrested at higher rates than white persons in 92 percent of police jurisdictions.

Black communities are more heavily policed: Communities with more Black residents tended to be more saturated with police officers, with more police officers per population.

Some police departments show a clear pattern of using more force than other departments: Police in Oakland, Miami, San Francisco, and New York had among the lowest rates of police shootings per every 10,000 arrests they made. Meanwhile, Detroit and Oklahoma City consistently had the highest rates of police shootings.

80 percent of jurisdictions increased police funding from 2013-18: Residents in Baltimore City, Oakland, and New York City spent three to four times more per capita on policing than residents in El Paso, Virginia Beach, or Indianapolis in 2018.

Looking at all the findings together, according to researchers, “reveals a disturbing picture of policing across the nation.” Altogether, most departments received a score lower than 50 percent and almost no departments scored higher than 70 percent.

“This suggests the need to thoroughly reimagine and transform the way the vast majority of cities and counties in the United States approach public safety,” the report says.

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