Harris received highly positive coverage in such publications as U.S. News and World Report for her declaration that it was long overdue for there to be “an honest, transparent and data-driven conversation about police use of force.” U.S. News also depicted Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, D-Pomona, as a visionary for coming up with the idea in 2014.

Harris and Rodriguez may end up amply deserving credit if they do usher in a new era in which statistical tools illustrate the extent of police misconduct. But little of the coverage of URSUS focuses on the question of incentives within law enforcement agencies. As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and many others have written over the past 40 years, police of all ranks have many reasons to create tidy narratives about their actions.

Officers have an incentive to not report their violent incidents and to depict injuries suffered by suspects as not their fault; the other officers who witness such violence have an incentive to not report or to inaccurately depict such injuries because of a police culture with a still-strong “code of silence”; and police chiefs and top police brass have an incentive to not accurately report incidents within their ranks because of concerns on how it would reflect on them and their departments.

This long history of police not acting to limit misconduct is a factor in the huge gap between African American and white perceptions of police misconduct, according to recent research by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Justice.

State law requiring reporting of fatalities flouted in L.A.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle, analyzing research done by Texas State University covering the years from 2006-2015, has given an example of how the incentives for police to resist oversight have resulted in a lax police culture in California.

A state law adopted long before the controversies over police killings in New York City, Baltimore and Cleveland requires local law enforcement to report fatal shootings by officers to the state government.

But the Chronicle’s analysis found it to be broadly ignored over the 10 years of data compiled by Texas State University researchers. Some of the key findings:

• At least 439 fatal police shootings were never reported to the state, 30 percent of the estimated 1,480 such killings over the decade.
• The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the largest sheriff’s department in the United States, didn’t report at least 34 fatal shootings; the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t report at least 21; and the Fresno Police Department didn’t report at least 24.

The Chronicle’s data suggests California law enforcement agencies may be getting better at reporting such fatal shootings. The 10-year average of unreported police killings was 30 percent. Last year, the percentage appears to be closer to 25 percent, though exact numbers are not yet available.

But in San Francisco, the percentage of unreported police killings in 2015 was 100 percent. The Chronicle said city police officials didn’t notify the state of any of the six police killings last year.

Now an effort is being launched to see whether “Big Data” might be able to reduce California’s often-awful urban gridlock. Fortune magazine has the details:

Los Angeles’ snarled, rage-inducing roads have been infamous for decades. And now, thanks to a tech industry-fueled population explosion, San Francisco is right behind L.A. in the title race for Worst Traffic in America.

 

AT&T, UC Berkeley and California’s state transportation authority are testing a new way to get a grip on the situation — by collecting and analyzing drivers’ cellphone location data. The study leads insist that users’ privacy is protected, and the information could revolutionize how we plan and manage highways and transit.

 

“The idea of using cellular data for mobility is not very new,” admits Alexei Pozdnukhov, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Smart Cities program. “What is new … is that our approach is much more detailed modeling. We can simulate very detailed scenarios, and answer questions.”

L.A. and Bay Area the initial focus

Traffic can be horrible in other parts of the state — San Diego and Sacramento freeways are often brutally clogged in the morning and evening rush hours, and the 75-mile section of the Interstate 15 corridor from Lake Elsinore to Hesperia is a common target of Sigalerts during daylight hours because of heavy commercial traffic. But the initial focus will be on the biggest population centers:

The new California projects — Connected Corridors in Los Angeles, and SmartBay in San Francisco — are something like Google Maps on steroids. They compile region-wide cell data into big portraits, not just of where traffic is most congested, but of overall daily patterns.

 

“[It shows] where people … work, where they go for shopping, where they go for leisure, and how they choose to get there,” says Pozdnukhov. Dr. Compin says that’s “the holy grail” of transit planning.

 

The data will help planners develop detailed responses to congestion events — Compin says there are a stunning 5,000 to 6,000 events per year on the I-210 corridor, making up about 50 percent of traffic delays. By working closely with local authorities and public transit providers, Caltrans hopes to make better decisions about how to re-route traffic onto parallel corridors and local roads, and communicate changes to commuters more smoothly. The San Francisco pilot is centered on Interstate 80, and among other things, says Pozdnukhov, hopes to determine the potential impact of increased development on the Treasure Island neighborhood the highway passes through.

Research can be basis of driverless-car grid

The effort depicted by the Fortune article could end up being as tantamount to a crucial first step toward establishing a grid for driverless cars. Such a grid could steer traffic in certain directions based on algorithms anticipating optimal vehicle flow. The theory is this could be done in a way that would dramatically reduce gridlock.

Studies also emphasize how an orderly computer-run traffic grid of autonomous cars could sharply reduce pollution, especially if the cars were hybrids or otherwise didn’t have internal combustion engines.

This is why experts are both encouraged and frustrated by new research by the California HealthCare Foundation on how to control the costs of childbirth while making it safer than ever. The study is encouraging because it suggests considerable savings are readily achieved if “best practices” are routinely followed, but frustrating because it shows how slow the health care establishment in California has been to embrace the approach.

Caesarean section births cost an average of $19,000, the survey found, versus $11,000 for normal childbirth. C-sections should only be used if there are serious chances of a complication during normal childbirth, experts say, but are routinely used for low-risk births — even though major surgery has many possible complications and risks of its own. The CHCF study found that in well-run California hospitals, 19 percent of births are C-sections vs. 58 percent in poorly run hospitals. The national average is 33 percent.

The study also found better hospitals only use episiotomies — which make it easier for a baby to emerge from the womb — 2 percent of the time versus 46 percent in less well-run hospitals. Better hospitals were also far more vigilant in promoting breastfeeding and in exploring whether a woman who had her first child by C-section needs a C-section for her second child. Well-run hospitals are vastly more likely to recommend regular vaginal births with such women than poorly run hospitals.

Money and peer pressure pay off

The wide variance in how hospitals deal with something as fundamental as childbirth is seen as one more byproduct of a complex health care system in which a third party (insurers or the government) often pays the cost of care provided to patients.

Kaiser Health News, however, had an encouraging report recently about Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach and how it has prompted doctors to stop recommending C-sections to women facing little risk of difficult childbirths. It involves both educating the physicians and a degree of shaming.

At Hoag, where more than 6,000 babies are born each year, [Dr. Allyson] Brooks and other administrators knew that they had to focus on changing the mindset and behavior of physicians. “Hospitals don’t do C-sections, doctors do,” she said.

So they took some aggressive steps. First, they shared the data with all the physicians in the department without names — then decided to reveal the names. Suddenly, everyone knew who had exceeded or come in under the average.

“There was a lot of upheaval,” Dr. Jeffrey Illeck, a community OB-GYN and the hospital’s obstetrics department chair. “None of us want to look bad in front of our peers. … And some looked horrible.”

Some physicians reacted with surprise and frustration. Initially, many attributed the high rates to the patients, saying they were older, had more complicated pregnancies or demanded scheduled C-sections. …

Dr. Amy VanBlaricom, an OB-GYN who delivers about 25 to 30 babies a month, … said being aware that Hoag is monitoring the C-sections has changed how she thinks about her practice and has encouraged her to let women remain in labor longer.

That’s what Hoag administrators were aiming for – a realization among doctors that C-sections should not be undertaken lightly. They carry surgical risks, including serious infection and blood clots, and require longer hospital stays.

Bending the ‘cost curve’ of medicine

The idea floated by advocates of the Affordable Care Act — that the U.S. government could change the “cost curve” of medicine to achieve major savings — wasn’t well-explained by many Washington reporters. Encouraged by official reports, they often focused on the idea that preventive care would be the change agent.

But as the C-section research shows, the change agent could be the “big data” approach. It may have the potential to bring U.S. health care costs more in line with those seen in other advanced countries — so long as there are incentives to encourage physicians and hospital administrators to try to do what’s most sensible, not what’s easiest.

Los Angeles’ police department isn’t alone in leaning hard on the use of data. Over the past several years, law enforcement officers around the country have turned to numbers-crunching to help solve — and even prevent — crime. From Washington on down to the municipal level, the trend has been clear.

The idea is simple: Collecting large amounts of information can aid the Department of Homeland Security and a small-town police department alike. Powerful conclusions can be drawn from data compiled from crime reports, emergency calls and the like.

But as L.A.’s experience shows, there are perils. First, human error can slip by undetected, causing cities and citizens to put misplaced confidence in numbers and trends.

Second, more deliberate “mistakes” can be made, fostering a kind of false confidence with potentially damaging consequences.

Third, cities and police forces themselves can fall into patterns of misconduct that good-looking data is used tacitly to justify.

All three of these problems have worked their way into the LAPD’s use of big data.

Misclassified crimes

In a bombshell story, The Los Angeles Times revealed the results of an exhaustive report into misuse of data on the force. From Sept. 2012 to Sept. 2013, L.A. cops “misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes” that included “stabbings, beatings and robberies.”

In fact, almost “all the misclassified crimes were actually aggravated assaults” that wound up “recorded as minor offenses.” The result? The crimes “did not appear in the LAPD’s published statistics on serious crime,” which “officials and the public use to judge the department’s performance.”

In interviews, current and retired police officers gave the Times two different explanations for the systematic discrepancies. Some said they were merely “inadvertent.” For others, however, “the problem stemmed from relentless, top-down pressure to meet crime reduction goals.”

As the Times explained, top cops “set statistical goals” for crime reduction at the beginning of every year. That overarching plan leads to the creation of smaller, but just as data-driven, objectives. “As part of that process, the department’s 21 divisions are given numerical targets for serious crimes each month.”

Instead of taking the emotion and uncertainty out of reducing crime, however, at least one source suggested the opposite began to happen. Since the numbers became paramount, opportunities arose to use terminology to change what it was the numbers indicated. Crime could appear to decrease, not by pushing the numbers down, but by altering the classifications that made sense of the numbers.

Official reaction

Initially, the LAPD balked at the Times’ report. Officers had already been pulled into a controversy by the Daily News, which recently questioned city murder statistics. The Daily News wanted to know why the LAPD had reported such low rates of crime-solving. (Chief Beck had gone on record saying cops had solved substantially more murders than reported to federal and state authorities.)

After first promising to “open up the books,” Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese backtracked, claiming the LAPD’s inspector general, Alex Bustamante, would dig into the matter and publicly present his findings to the Police Commission.

Bustamante confirmed he would be reviewing that matter. But he also announced he would lead an investigation into several years of statistics to shed light on the misclassifications of crime that Times report had uncovered.

That includes a full investigation into COMPSTAT, the centerpiece of the LAPD’s big data program. Bustamante told the Daily News that he’d far exceed the scope and detail of the Times investigation, in a “much more expansive” look at “thousands and thousands” of cases.

In the event that wrongdoing is found, the LAPD has indicated those responsible will be disciplined. A larger question remains, however. If big data-driven policing is here to stay, what steps must be taken by officials to restore the trust of Angelenos and their elected representatives?