When politicians target data, public safety takes a hit
On the first Friday of every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases federal data on unemployment, jobs and wages from the month prior.
Sometimes the economic outlook is good, sometimes it isn’t. It’s not perfect, but Americans have always been able to count on those numbers for the best estimates possible, unbiased and unpolluted by politics.
When the bureau released its most recent jobs report, President Trump didn’t like what he saw and fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who had been confirmed last year by a bipartisan vote of 86-8 in the Senate. This move drew rebukes from both sides of the aisle.
As the political firestorm ignited by the president’s actions continues, one thing is clear: The episode has chilling implications for the federal government’s other research and statistical agencies, the offices responsible for measuring and assessing a wide range of issues that affect American life.
Early in my career I served in one of those offices — the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation arm of the Department of Justice. Two decades later, I returned to the department as the assistant attorney general, overseeing both the National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
My strategy for the science agencies was to bring in top experts to lead these offices, fight for the resources they needed to do their jobs and then get out of the way.
Thanks to exceptional scientific leaders and expert career staff, the Bureau of Justice Statistics cleared the backlog of reports that had languished during the previous administration, releasing more than 200 statistical reports in four years.
The agency worked to make more data available in new ways too, including publishing new interactive data tools and short data briefs. And it did so despite chronically low funding levels from Congress for research and statistics.
Why does this matter? New data about crime and the justice system should be actionable and indispensable, offering clues and strategies about when, where and how to prevent crime in the first place. As we know so well, you can’t fix what you can’t see.
Consider deaths of people in the custody of the justice system. Equipped with data showing that 40 percent of jail deaths occur in the first week of incarceration, correctional leaders can take steps in those early hours and days to prevent those tragedies.
When it comes to federal law enforcement, data helps agencies in myriad ways, including making smarter hiring decisions. If hiring authorities don’t know an officer has a track record of misconduct or abuse, for example, they might make a job offer without exploring the circumstances.
Data informs sound public policy, too. If you listen to the news but don’t look at the facts, you might incorrectly believe that juveniles are driving violence, which could lead to unwise and even damaging policy choices.
But some of this information is starting to quietly disappear.
As detailed in a new Council on Criminal Justice report, the administration has eliminated a new database on federal police accountability, terminated assistance to help jurisdictions improve deaths in custody reporting, deleted statistics on racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, and taken offline a National Institute of Justice study showing that immigrants are arrested at significantly lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens.
At other agencies, federal datasets have been altered, often without a record of what, exactly, has been changed. And we don’t know what, or who, will be on the chopping block next.
To be fair, over the last month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics began releasing new reports on a wide range of topics, an encouraging development. And, of course, things weren’t perfect when I left the Justice Department last year. Data lags between many core surveys were, and are, significantly longer than ideal.
As a result, and mostly as a function of its meager budget, we now go more than a decade without new insights on what’s going on inside local jails, with recidivism rates or indigent defense. We wait too long for federal crime and victimization data too, when near real-time statistics are both viable and invaluable.
According to a recent poll by SSRS, the vast majority of the U.S. population — Republicans and Democrats alike — believe federal statistics are important for understanding society and should be collected, regardless of politics. This is surely the case for public safety as it is for the economy.
Our police chiefs, mayors and citizens deserve timely, accurate and actionable data from our government on crime in our communities. But this only works if we can trust that what our government says is the truth.
Amy L. Solomon is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. She previously served as an assistant attorney general in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice overseeing federal grantmaking and the science offices.