One evening in 2008, Phillip Atiba Goff set out to perform what seemed a fairly routine task: He was trying to track down data on race and police behavior. He had recently co-founded the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, with a goal to improve relations between police departments and communities, and he needed statistics. His initial questions were extremely basic: How many police officers were involved in shootings every year? How many of those shot by police were minorities?

Goff’s mother had been a reference librarian, and he’d inherited her research skills, so he figured he’d have answers quickly. He sat down at his computer at 10 p.m. and went to work. Thirteen hours later, Goff, who had spent much of his career studying hidden racial biases and stereotyping, realized something that would change the course of his research: There was no way to quantify the prevalence of racism in policing, or to analyze comparisons in ethnic backgrounds of people who had been shot by officers. There was no way to know how many police shootings occurred in any part of America, at any given time.

There was no data to analyze because no one bothered to collect it.

“I was so aghast,” said Goff, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA, who is currently a visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. It was not that this information did not matter. Rather, data were not regularly collected because each police department handled the information differently, which made it impossible to meaningfully aggregate or compare.

Recent crises focus national attention

How could racially biased law enforcement be prevented, Goff thought, if there was no way to measure it? It was in that moment that he launched what would become a formidable undertaking — collecting national data about police and the citizens and communities that they patrol.

It was a lonely undertaking at first, one that attracted only a handful of scholars, scarce funding and little attention. Not any longer. Three recent killings by police officers have riveted public attention: one in New York City, another in Ferguson, Missouri, and the third in North Charleston, South Carolina. In all three cases, white officers shot black men. “For the first time,” Goff said, “there is tremendous interest” — not just from activists, scholars and citizens but also from police chiefs and law enforcement personnel.

Public attention intensified when FBI Director James B. Comey spoke forcefully about racial bias in policing, spotlighting the challenges that Goff has been trying to tackle for the past decade. In a speech at Georgetown University, Comey recalled how, in the days after riots in Ferguson, he asked for reliable data about police shootings. A chief told Comey he “didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a year or one a century, and that in the absence of good data, ‘All we get are ideological thunderbolts, when what we need are ideological agnostics who use information to try to solve problems.’”

Now, armed with funding from private organizations, the U.S. Department of Justice and a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Goff and his team at the Center for Policing Equity have launched the Justice Database to measure disparities in policing. Forty police departments and agencies have signed on to participate in the project, and the center is now preparing to begin analyzing data, which will cover more than 25% of the U.S. population. Many police chiefs are hungry for this data, Goff said. “We are rushing to meet the needs of law enforcement.”

In addition to pure policing data, the Justice Database will examine trends in education and joblessness, and look at how these combined elements affect law enforcement. The database will turn an emotionally charged issue into a more nuanced one with the potential to create real change, Goff said.

“The goal is to turn this into a mining expedition to understand everything we can,” Goff said. “It’s embarrassing, not just that no one can tell me how many people got shot by police last year. It’s embarrassing that we don’t know how racial segregation influences law enforcement. How is that possible?”

Questions from the community

These days when Goff speaks to people in the community and police officers, he is often asked, “What are we to make of the Michael Brown shooting and the aftermath? What are we to make of the Eric Garner killing and the aftermath?” Goff tells them: “You can say they died from police violence and racial politics.” But he believes it’s more than that. “We are in a crisis of vision.”

“You have police officers who sign up to do the right thing, who are literally tasked with doing the wrong thing,” Goff said. This is where he believes change needs to occur, and commitments by police chiefs and leaders like Comey reinforce what Goff has been working toward for so long: “That it’s possible at the highest levels of government to have adult conversations about these issues that are not about blame but responsibility.”

This is a condensed version of a story in UCLA Blueprint’s Spring 2015 inaugural issue. Read the complete story here.