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The Brookhaven Police Department has started reviewing ethnicity and race reporting requirements in response to recommendations from the city’s social justice commission.
The Social Justice, Race, and Equity Commission (SJREC) was created in September 2020 and tasked with recommending improvements to the city’s vision and mission statement, city hiring and retention practices, procurement and contracting, and policing. The commission’s policing committee often discussed the need for more precise race and ethnicity data in police reporting, and the city voted to move forward with the recommendations made by the SJREC in December of 2021.
According to the SJREC’s implementation plan, in the second quarter of 2022, the police department is expected to review “the current federal reporting requirements as it relates to race and ethnicity and explore the potential expansion of demographic identifiers.”
Spokesperson Sgt. Jacob Kissel said the department has started the review, but there is no timeline on when the review will be completed. In the meantime, the department has released its 2021 Annual Report, which does not include race and ethnicity data. In 2020, the BPD started a “Transparency Project” campaign that publicized arrest and use of force data by race. Some sections of the transparency website have been updated with 2021 data, while others have not.
One section of the police department’s website shows updated reported use of force data from 2021. According to the BPD’s data, Brookhaven police used force against people 328 times in 2021, accounting for about 0.6% of all interactions with citizens, which the department marked at 54,950. Out of those 328 instances, there were 88 times where police made physical contact with a person, 28 times where police used a taser on someone, and nine times where police used a dog against someone. According to the report, the other 203 instances involved an officer displaying force. An example of this would be an officer pulling out a gun or a taser, but not using it. According to the report, no one died as a result of these instances.
According to BPD data, 72% of the people who police used force against were not residents of Brookhaven. Another chart reported that 19% percent of the people were white, 59% were Black, 3% were Asian, and under 1% were of an unknown race.
The chart also reported that 19% identified as Hispanic. The Brookhaven Police Department began including a category for ethnicity in 2020, and before that time mostly reported Hispanic arrestees as white. The 2021 use of force page did not include the race of any of the 19% of people who identified as Hispanic. Kissel said the department did not have a graph that solely reported race, and that he did not know the race of the 19% of people who were Hispanic.
Another section of the website shows arrest data from 2020. After Kissel said the department has no plans to update that webpage with 2021 data, Reporter Newspapers requested a breakdown of arrests in 2021 by race and ethnicity of the people arrested.
According to the 2021 Annual Report, the BPD made 2,586 arrests in 2021, up about 13.4% from 2,281 in 2020. However, the records request showed that the BPD made 2,627 arrests in 2021. Kissell said that after searching himself, he found a total of 2,633 arrests for the year of 2021.
Kissel said the discrepancy in the annual report was due to the report only showing incidents that were “cleared by arrest,” meaning the case was cleared after the police arrested someone. Cases can also be administratively cleared, or someone be arrested and then subsequently let go if the police discover the crime in question did not happen. He further stated that the discrepancy between the number of arrests he found was because of incidents where multiple people were taken into custody and documented under the same incident report.
Kissel said he would look into updating the information in the annual report.
According to the numbers given in the records request, 1,404 of people arrested were white, 1,182 were Black, 37 were Asian, and four were American Indian or Alaskan Native. Out of the 2,627 arrests, 1,544 of the people arrested did not identify as Hispanic, while 796 did. Twelve people who were arrested had their ethnicity listed as “unknown,” and the ethnicity option was blank for 275 people.
Other Annual Report Data
According to other data in the 2021 Annual Report, reported violent crime stayed mostly consistent to 2020, with a slight 2% increase from 200 instances to 204. The report shows a slight increase in reported murders and rapes, up from two homicides in 2020 to four in 2021, and up from nine reported rapes in 2020 to 19 in 2021. The report also shows an increase in aggravated assaults, up from 107 in 2020 to 131 in 2021. The report showed a decrease in reported robberies, down from 82 in 2020 to 50 in 2021.
Reported property crimes slightly decreased from 2020 to 2021, dropping from 1,532 in 2020 to 1,434 in 2021, or by about 6.4%. Reported burglaries went down from 163 in 2020 to 148 in 2021. Motor vehicle theft decreased from 176 reported cases in 2020 to 131 in 2021. Reported larceny decreased by about 3%, dropping from 1,193 in 2020 to 1,155 in 2021.
According to the report, there were 83,971 calls for service in 2021, dropping by about 7.8% from 91,159 calls in 2020. The police department made 2,586 arrests in 2021, up 13.4% from 2,281 in 2020.
The entire report can be viewed on the BPD’s website.
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