Policing In The Pandemic
By: Xristos Katsaros
Tags: Covid 19, Prison, Police, Data

Policing In The Pandemic

Tracking arrests and the impact of COVID-19 in prisons

When I began writing this story, I was interested in visualizing the rate of infection in prisons across the United States. Then the murder of George Floyd happened, and another question came to mind: what are the police arresting people for during the pandemic? How many of these arrests are putting people in jail? Answering either of those questions proved harder than I thought, because the data is either missing or wrapped behind bureaucratic red tape. What I was able to find, however, is that police are (still) continuously arresting people for non-violent offenses, despite the rise of infections within jails.

COVID In Prisons

Thankfully, for my first question, UCLA Law’s COVID Behind Bars project has kept up with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths throughout jails and prisons across the United States. The Google spreadsheet is updated daily, and the history of these updates is maintained on Qri Cloud. With this data, I was able to visualize the rate of COVID-19 infections in jails and prisons.

The number of confirmed cases has not let up at all, which is bad news on its own, but when you also consider the massive protests happening across the country, it’s likely to get worse. The Associated Press reported that 4,000 (most likely higher now) arrests were made since the start of the protests. Depending on the state, in order to get that kind of data, you have to request it.

In Hennepin County — where George Floyd was murdered — a data request via their portal can take up to ten days to be fulfilled, and there are limitations. According to their site,

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is not required to provide the data in a specific format or arrangement if it does not already keep the data in that format or arrangement. For example, if the data exists only on paper, the office is not required to create electronic documents.

This makes it very difficult to access open data that is technically available to the public. You would think that in 2020 we’d have instant access to public records, but that is unfortunately a concept that hasn’t full materialized.

People In Police Custody

For New York City, you can find a dataset of the number of daily inmates in police custody through the regularly-updated open data site. LA, Boston, and Chicago have open data sites as well, although their datasets are different. There isn’t exactly a standard practice of record keeping, which is something I’ll touch on later, but open data is better than the request portals you see for smaller cities like Minneapolis. With open data, along with Qri, I can write transform scripts that will help me to keep up-to-date with the latest version of the dataset, along with maintaining a record of the changes made to the dataset. For more on how transform scripts work and what they look like, head over to Qri.

In NYC, we can see the number of of inmates taken into custody and have yet to be released, climbing everyday.

The rate of infection has seemed to have slowed down in NYC jails, which might be caused by New York City officials using ankle bracelets opposed to jailing. This initiative went into effect April 20th, and is part of a series of reforms state lawmakers are making, in an effort to eliminate cash bail for non-violent offenses. However, with reports like this, and the one below, it’s hard to say for sure how long that initiative will be effective.

Arrests Made During The Pandemic

Other cities like Chicago and LA do not have datasets for inmates taken into custody, but they do keep a weekly-updated dataset of crimes that are reported. Using that these tables, I can filter out the rows where no arrests were made, and find out how frequently police are arresting people during the pandemic, and what they are arresting them for.

In both of the datasets, domestic violence is the reason for most of the arrests. This confirms what has already been reported: domestic violence is on the rise during the pandemic. People who are in an abusive relationship, are stuck inside looking for a way out. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that these arrests are leading to solutions in reducing domestic violence. There’s evidence that a large portion of police across the country are domestic abusers themselves, but that kind of data is not recorded accurately or regularly. Nonetheless, imagine the bias of a police officer responding to a domestic abuse call, who just so happens to also be an abuser.

Take note, in the LA chart, that the furthest bar to the left has no label. That is because in the LA dataset, the description of the arrest was null — it was left blank. Going through each of the descriptions, categorizing the descriptions as violent, non-violent, or “no description,” we can see that most of the time a person is being arrested, it’s for something “non-violent,” which likely can be addressed without the use of police force.

Arrests during the pandemic

The method I used to classify the arrests was to filter the ones that had words like “rape,” “battery,” “assault,” “violence,” “dangerous,” etc. These charts gives us a clear visualization of what prison and police abolitionists have been pointing out for a very long time: police mostly arrest people for non-violent incidents that can be handled in another manner.

Conclusion

From the datasets available immediately to the public, there is no way to confirm if these arrests have led to doing time behind bars, but we do see arrests being made for non-violent offenses. There are efforts to reduce infection in the prisons but these solutions aren’t working everywhere. With police continuing to make arrests as if COVID-19 doesn’t even exist, it’s hard to say the solutions that have worked or will be able to work for long. Policing in general must change, and that is precisely what people are currently protesting for.

Many solutions are being floated — one being the 8Can’tWait from Campaign Zero. Another 8-point plan called 8toAbolition is also gaining new attention. This latter plan focuses on the abolition of police and prisons, and challenges us to imagine new laws and approaches to handling social disputes and emergencies. In the past, prison and police abolitionists have been brushed off as being too radical, but considering the the way COVID-19 is already forcing us to make major changes in our social institutions, we should consider giving all of our social institutions a deep philosophical audit. We should amplify voices of the oppressed — specifically, Black and Indigenous people of this country — and look to them to lead that audit.

You can find more resources below to get a better understanding of what abolition means and steps to take for it to be achieved.

Resources