Came across this incredibly in-depth look at New Jersey's police force. Here's the Coles notes (as per Poynter):
- Reporters at NJ.com took 72,607 incident forms from 565 municipalities in the last five years.
- It took 506 public records requests.
- It cost about $36,500 in records requests, digitization, data entry and fact-checking.
Some of the things they found:
- New Jersey had no uniform way to track use of force.
- 10 percent of officers contributed to 38 percent of all use of force.
- Black people were three times more likely to encounter police force than white people.
- Towns with the highest use of force were suburban, liberal enclaves. In Maplewood, for instance, force is used in more than one out of every 10 arrests.
You can read an overview here:
https://www.poynter.org/news/njcoms-...k-police-force
And the source:
http://force.nj.com/
Or watch this 60 second video:
I don't want to make some blanket statement about how awesome or corrupt police forces are in North America, but there's clearly something missing in how these systems operate (I'm unclear if I would put Calgary as part of these 'systems'... but there's still value in comparing). The biggest thing for me in these links is how incredibly important high-level journalism is to point out these things.