N.C. City Says Data Entry Error Inflated Numbers of Police Encounters With Force

City officials on Wednesday said a data entry error is responsible for numbers published in a state Department of Justice database that shows Fayetteville police officers were encountering physical force exponentially more often than police elsewhere in the state.

The announcement came a day after Troy Williams, a radio personality on WIDU 1600 AM's "Wake Up" program, sent a letter to Mayor Tony Chavonne and other city officials asking them to review the department's "grossly disproportionate" numbers and asserting that the numbers "point to the probability that injustice in our community is more than just a perception."

Williams said in an interview Wednesday that the numbers in the SBI's database are admittedly hard to believe.

The numbers show that Fayetteville police encountered force in 531 instances from Jan. 1 through Oct. 31. In comparison, Charlotte police encountered force 55 times, Durham police encountered force 39 times and Raleigh police encountered force 25 times, according to the DOJ numbers.

City officials on Wednesday said the disparity between Fayetteville and significantly larger cities was the result of an "apparent data discrepancy" between police and DOJ records.

The data was entered incorrectly by a clerk who misunderstood how to enter the data from officer reports into the database, officials said. The clerk, who no longer works for the city, apparently checked the wrong boxes under the physical resistance encounter section while inputting the data, officials said.

"She incorrectly entered the data, so it blew up our numbers tremendously," said Fayetteville police spokesman Lt. Chris Davis, who said the department actually averages only three to five incidents per month where officers encounter force. "Our numbers are showing about 10 times what we were actually doing."

Davis said the data entered for the months of April and May, for example, is clearly incorrect -- the DOJ data shows Fayetteville police encountering force 238 times in April -- a rate of nearly eight times a day.

Police have general quality control checks in place to alert supervisors to errors in reported data, but the system was not designed to catch this particular error, Davis said. The error did not appear to be intentional, he said.

As a result of the discovery, police are reviewing the 531 questionable data entries to reconcile them with actual reports, officials said. The numbers will then be submitted to the DOJ for correction.

Police also plan to conduct an audit every 30 days of department data that is sent to the DOJ to ensure the numbers are correct.

Data collection

Williams, however, said he's been communicating with city officials for months about problems with these and other police statistics, and that he now believes there are systemic problems with data collection within the city.

Williams said he thinks the city should be subject to an independent audit to fact-check its books.

"I don't trust their numbers at all right now," Williams said. "The reason why these numbers matter is because they use these numbers to justify their policing behavior to certain segments of the community, specifically the African-American community. ... It just creates a situation where the community doesn't have the kind of confidence in its police force that it should have."

The police dispute any implication that the city is intentionally manipulating its numbers.

"If we were looking to skew numbers, why would we make it look like we're out there fighting the public or the public's fighting us?" Davis said. "There's no rhyme or reason why we would intentionally make ourselves look bad."

McClatchy-Tribune News Service