Editorial: Push for change: Don’t criticize police scrutiny

Police chiefs are feeling a little camera shy these days.

With the advent of video footage of fatal police shootings flashing before the public’s eyes, police chiefs have faced radical changes in their work. They consider their jobs more difficult, more political and less secure.

A story published in the New York Times Tuesday chronicled how police chiefs have begun altering their priorities — from simply solving crime to cultivating community relations — in response to the greater demand for accountability. Local police unions haven’t responded to the call for accountability with the same enthusiasm, battling chiefs as they alter their policies to make their forces more accountable.

While the responses to the heightened scrutiny have varied, there is one response police forces shouldn’t adopt — backlash against scrutiny. As a result of probing, we’re witnessing police chiefs respond positively with change — that alone shows how effective it’s been. We need to maintain the heat to achieve the change we need.

Confidence in the police is still low, and it’s going to take a lot of work — and openness — for police forces to restore trust within the community.

According to a June Gallup poll, only 52 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the police, the lowest that confidence levels have been in 22 years.

Police misconduct is rampant, and something we need to pay attention to.

According to The Guardian’s “The Counted,” a database tracking the people killed by the police in the United States this year, police have killed 1,061 people this year — a number that is constantly increasing. 

In fact, our emphasis on police accountability is beginning to generate figures on police shootings that we haven’t tried to obtain in the past.

Prior to The Guardian’s project, the FBI tracked police shootings using a voluntary program that allowed law enforcement agencies to choose to submit their annual count of “justifiable homicides.” As a result, only 1,100 police departments out of 18,000 agencies reported a “justifiable homicide” to the FBI between 2005 and 2012. In 2013, the FBI system only reported 461 justifiable homicides.

But, following The Guardian’s project — and in line with new demand for police accountability from civilians — the FBI is planning to overhaul their current system that will publish a wider range of data and resemble “The Counted,” according to federal officials.

Of course, change takes time, and we need to be realistic about our expectations of change.

But we’ll never know how much of our eroding structure will budge if we don’t make the push.