California To Track All Police Violence With Online Tool

California launched an online tool September 22 that enables police to report and track incidents of injury-inducing police force. All 800 police departments in the state are required to use it.

The open-sourced URSUS project, named after the bear depicted on the California flag, is the first comprehensive statewide data collection program of its kind in the country, and its creators hope that it will set the standard after which other states can model similar programs in order to make police more accountable, reports Fox News.

“It’s sort of like TurboTax for use-of-force incidents,” said Justin Erlich, a special assistant attorney general who is working on the data collection end of the program.

Under a state law passed in November 2015, departments will be required to input information into URSUS following all incidents of force, with information such as the race of the individual injured, the officers involved, details leading up to the use of force and officers’ justifications for it.

“As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force,” said California Attorney General Kamala Harris in a press release.

California joins Texas, Colorado and Connecticut as the only states that require their police departments to track use of force, though this California’s is the first comprehensive digital system.

“This is hugely important,” said Peter Bibring, director of police practices at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “We’re not taking use of force seriously until we’re tracking information about every use-of-force incident.”

The goal was to collect enough information on incidents that cause major injuries without getting caught up on more minor scrapes and bruises and to track trends that could give people the answers that they need in the wake of the many shootings of unarmed black men over the last few years.

“We live in a culture that perpetuates racism and we need to be able to verify that racism through data,” said Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. “For the people who continue to deny racial disparities exist in this country, this data will allow us to have those living room and dinner conversations and share facts.”

So far in 2016, officer have fatally shot more than 700 people and are on course to kill as many or more than the 1,000 civilians that died in 2015, notes the Washington Post.

Sources: Fox News, Washington Post / Photo Credit: Mpeake/Flickr