Tulsa World: UC's Robin Engel analyzing Tulsa police use-of-force encounters

University of Cincinnati criminologist Robin Engel will soon release a dataset that could hold important implications for understanding police use-of-force encounters nationwide, reports the Tulsa World.

Engel, director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the University of Cincinnati Center for Police Research and Policy, is one of two lead researchers who presented a preliminary report to the Tulsa City Council in September on Tulsa police officers’ use-of-force encounters. The study, funded by a grant from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and conducted in association with the University of Texas at San Antonio, is based on electronic data on all police-civilian interactions that resulted in an arrest from Jan. 1, 2016, through June 30, 2018.

“Importantly, the race of the suspect was NOT a statistically significant predictor of the use of force after controlling for other factors,” the final report states, the same as the preliminary one in September.

The final report did not include coded analysis of officers’ written narratives of use-of-force incidents. Researchers are now analyzing those narratives and plan to release their findings in a separate report in the spring, the Tulsa World reports.

“I do think it’s going to be the richest and most important (data source) — not just for what we bring back to the city of Tulsa but for nationally — because the coding of the use-of-force narratives is really the best understanding of the civilian resistance compared to officer use of force and that back and forth,” Engel told council members and the public. “Understanding that and coding that in a systematic way from these narratives will produce a very rich and very large database.”

Read the full story here.

Featured image at top: Tulsa Police Department badge. Credit: Shane T. McCoy / US Marshal under CC BY-ND 2.0