It was human error. But missing police pursuit data still marred a Pierce County audit | Opinion

Spend enough time listening to lawmakers and you’re bound to hear repeated calls for “data-driven policy.” It’s become such a common refrain among local elected officials that the idea has become both sacrosanct and at times meaningless.

We all want our laws and decisions to be based on facts. That goes without saying. But the inconvenient problem with facts alone — or hard data, since the general public broadly considers the two things to be the same — is that numbers and figures, even at their best, are messy and easily misleading.

Case in point: Washington’s current conversation surrounding police pursuits. Depending on who you ask — or what data is cited — a controversial 2021 reform, limiting when law enforcement can engage in a vehicular chase, has done one of two things: It’s either increased public safety and reduced accidents and fatalities, or contributed to the downfall of lawful society by emboldening bad guys and unleashing a torrent of crime.

Frankly, it’s a lot to make sense of for the average person, and likely for the average lawmaker, too. In the midst of one of the fiercest partisan debates in recent memory, what we need — more than anything — is reliable data coupled with sober, informed analysis. You can’t have one without the other, and without both, bad things can happen.

That’s why Wednesday’s meeting of the Pierce County Council’s Performance Audit Committee was so troubling. In December, the committee was presented with a report compiled by county policy analysts that examined the local before-and-after impact of changes to Washington’s police pursuit law. But that report — which was subsequently cited by proponents of the reform, including in a recent op-ed by Tacoma state Rep. Sharlett Mena and Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, both Democrats — was missing key data from the Lakewood Police Department.

In total, 30 pursuits provided by the department were never included in the initial report, according County Council spokesperson Bryan Dominique, who chalked the mistake up to human error.

Combined with data on 40 additional pursuits Lakewood Police have provided since the report was released, it’s enough to significantly alter the picture the report paints of how dangerous police pursuits were in Lakewood before the law changed.

What do I mean? When the audit report was first published, it included data showing that, prior to changes to state law, 38% of Lakewood Police pursuits resulted in crashes, while only 35% resulted in arrests and 9% resulted in injuries. Essentially, that’s a one-to-one ratio of crashes to arrests, which doesn’t sound good, making it prime fodder for reform advocates.

But after the report was updated this week with the additional data, the same table now shows that only about 25% of Lakewood pursuits resulted in crashes prior to the law being changed, while nearly 50% resulted in arrests — with another 7% resulting in an arrest after police followed up. Meanwhile, only 6.29% resulted in injuries.

Significant difference, right? It sure feels like it. And that’s the problem.

According to city spokesperson Brynn Grimley, Lakewood officials first noticed the incorrect data when Rep. Mena and Sen. Trudeau’s op-ed was published in early February, bringing it to the county’s attention in short order.

“We want to make sure that the people in Olympia who are making decisions have the right facts,” Grimley said. “Especially when it’s being used to make decisions on public policy that affects everyone, they need to be looking at the right information.”

Now here’s where things get complicated: The Lakewood police data provides a single snapshot within a much larger report. In fact, according to county policy analyst Nathan Schumer and senior policy analyst Bill Vetter, the audit they spent six months working on relies almost exclusively on data from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department to draw its main conclusions. The Lakewood data was incorporated mostly for comparison purposes, they said this week. Data from Tacoma and Puyallup was not included.

Despite the mistake, Schumer and Vetter stand by the audit report’s key findings, namely that Washington’s new pursuit law has had mixed results — and there are still a host of unknowns. They found that police pursuits have decreased significantly, as one might expect, while the arrest and injury rate of pursuits has remained largely consistent. Pursuits related to DUI have increased, proportionately, while determining whether the change in state law has led to a spike in car thefts — as has been routinely argued by law enforcement officials — requires further study.

The report was never designed to draw conclusions, Vetter noted. And more importantly, even the numbers themselves are open to interpretation. For instance, at what point does a pursuit become a pursuit, and where do you draw the line when determining whether an accident was caused by one? What happens when different police departments have different definitions?

Still, Vetter acknowledged that the missing data — and the fact that there was missing data — contributed to possibly misleading arguments and, more broadly, has the potential to undercut faith in government transparency.

Those 30 pursuits simply got lost in the shuffle, he said.

And with temperatures running as hot as they are, a mistake is easily amplified.

“It’s important to get it right. … Obviously, if you have the wrong data and you’re making decisions, that could lead you to the wrong decision,” Vetter said. “In this particular case, it doesn’t really change the thrust of the report — because we didn’t really draw any conclusions and didn’t use the (Lakewood) data and further analysis — but you know … you can kind of see how the (incorrect data) can be used to make a point.”

Yes, you certainly can.