Areas with good data often have policy debates that are not possible in places where poor data makes it hard to know what’s going on.
Last Monday, we published a data-driven look at the decline of traffic stops in America. The cities and states we highlighted weren’t necessarily those with the steepest declines in traffic enforcement nationally — they were places with steep declines that data enabled us to see.
There is no national standard or source for recording traffic stops, so we tried to gather data from as many different cities and state agencies as possible. Many cities we would have liked to have shown had incomplete data.
And other cities publish no data on traffic stops at all.
The lack of reliable, comparable data doesn’t just make our job as reporters tricky. Communities with good data often have different political and policy discussions than places where nonexistent data makes it hard for the public to know what’s going on. Data collection is also a police reform in itself. Data mandates tell the police that their actions are being tracked. As several researchers told us, the existence of data alone can change how the police behave.
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