An investigation from the Arizona Republic finds between January 2021 and last November, Phoenix police officers pointed guns at people more than 19,000 times. And in nearly 1,600 of those instances, the person having the gun pointed at them was between the ages of 2 and 17.
This comes as the department has been scrutinized by the U.S. Justice Department over its use of force policies; the agency released a scathing report based on its three-year probe last year.
Sahana Jayaraman, a data reporter at the Arizona Republic, reported and wrote the investigation and joined The Show to discuss if it was a challenge to get as complete and accurate data on these incidents as possible.
Full conversation
SAHANA JAYARAMAN: Complete, I mean, the data itself that I analyzed is actually it's publicly available. It's posted to the city of Phoenix's open data portal, and, you know, it purportedly contains a row for every time a Phoenix police officer has pointed a gun at someone, but I found that some of the families that I was speaking to, the Dodd family in particular, is saying that Phoenix PD pointed guns at them, but the Dodd family doesn't show up in the data, which does raise questions about how complete and accurate the actual data set is.
MARK BRODIE: What are some of the reasons why a police officer might point a gun at somebody?
JAYARAMAN: From the police department, a spokesperson told me in an email that sometimes, gunpoint incidents happen when a police officer has their gun up and covering a quote unquote threat area, and somebody, quote unquote incidentally or quote unquote unexpectedly, appears in that threat area.
And I found that, you know, sometimes pointed gun incidents involving children, happen when adults put those children's safety at risk. in one of the examples that I wrote about in my story, a special assignments unit from the Phoenix Police Department pointed their guns at two women holding toddlers in an apartment while they were serving a search warrant. They were serving the search warrant because they were looking for an 18-year-old man who also lived in that apartment who was suspected of killing somebody at a Phoenix park three days earlier.
But one of the most difficult things for me to get answers to was why these incidents happen. That information is often contained within police records and police reports, and the Phoenix Police Department is very slow to release those records and reports when they release them at all.
BRODIE: Well, so you also spoke with some criminology experts about this. What did you hear from from those experts who looked at this data? Like, what did they have to say about what what you found?
JAYARAMAN: You know, none of them had looked at this data. This specific Phoenix Police Department's data in depth before, there were really varied perspectives on what I found and what it meant. Michael Scott, who is the director for the center for ASU Center for Problem Oriented Policing and was a former police chief, said that without looking at every single report, the existence of the problem couldn't be identified.
You know, Michael Sierra Arevalo, who, who wrote the book “The Danger Imperative,” said that he thought the way to reduce pointed gun incidents was to reduce the number of total contacts that police have with the community, and, Justin Nix, who was one of the researchers who originally suggested that Phoenix PD track this stat at all, said that, you know, this would be thousands of incidents of uses of force that the public wouldn't know about without the tracking of that data. So, so really varied perspectives on what the data meant and whether there was a problem with how Phoenix police officers are pointing guns at people and children.
BRODIE: Is there a sense of how what you found in Phoenix compares to police departments in other cities in terms of the frequency with which they point guns at children?
JAYARAMAN: So that was one thing that I sort of had difficulty parsing out, as Michael Scott said, and as Justin Nix has has written in some of his research, the collection of this data across the country is a relatively new thing. There isn't a ton of basis on which to compare the data.
There are other very large cities who do collect this information. I think Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas, they all have their officers track when they point guns at people, and they all implemented that policy before Phoenix did. So it's not like Phoenix is the only city that does this, but it's certainly not like something as old or as frequently done as tracking, say,
BRODIE: What do Phoenix Police Department guidelines or regulations or rules say about when it is appropriate or when it is OK to point a gun at somebody?
JAYARAMAN: So the, the Phoenix Police Department actually doesn't have a policy about when that specifically outlines when it's appropriate to point a gun at someone, and this was one of my most surprising finds personally early on.
I just kind of assumed, I think as a layperson that the Phoenix Police Department and all police departments really would have a policy about when it's OK to like pull a gun and point it at someone, but they don't, and the Phoenix Police Department is not the only department that doesn't have a policy, just within the state, I think. You know, I looked at Mesa, Glendale, Scottsdale. I don't think any of those three have a specific policy about when officers can pull guns either.
I know Chandler does, I know Tucson does, so there are departments out there that have policies, you know, more explicitly outlining when it's OK for officers to point guns at people, but Phoenix PD is not one of them.
BRODIE: Do police officers get in trouble for pointing guns at kids, especially if the kids have nothing to do with a crime that's being committed?
JAYARAMAN: According to the Justice Department, they do not. The Justice Department didn't say much about, police gunpointing in its three-year investigation on the Phoenix Police Department, but it did say that, the, the police supervisors charged with reviewing certain types of force incidents, including gunpoints, do not adequately essentially like look at officer tactics or the force used, and that. You know, Phoenix PD supervisors essentially okayed all of the incidents of gunpointing between 2021 and 2022, and there were thousands of them.
BRODIE: Did the police department or or even maybe the union representing the officers dispute that?
JAYARAMAN: Not to me, they did not. In their statements about the DOJ, the city of Phoenix did say that they the police department about the DOJ investigation, the Phoenix, the city of Phoenix did say that the police department was materially different than the department investigated, but whether or not that is true remains to be seen.
