The Ferguson Police Department will be using new record-keeping software by LEFTA (Law Enforcement Field Training Applications) Systems starting next week. The software, which was donated to the department by LEFTA’s CEO Bryan Selzer, will accomplish a number of things.
On a basic, organizational level, the software will provide one place for all Ferguson Police records to be kept. Before the implementation of this software, according to Ferguson Police Chief Delrish Moss, “a number of softwares were being used” to keep different types of records. LEFTA’s training records-management, traffic-stop-reporting and use-of-force reporting software will be “more user-friendly” and will streamline the collection of data on both the officers themselves and on their interactions with the community, Moss said.
“Last year when I first got here as city manager, we had a two and a half million dollar deficit, and a lot of programs that we needed to purchase,” said Ferguson City Manager De’Carlon Seewood. “So having someone step up and say, ‘Hey Ferguson, we understand where you’re going, we understand what you need and we’re here to help you’ is extremely important.”
The policing reforms Ferguson is trying to make are outlined in the U.S. Department of Justice consent decree with the Ferguson Police Department, negotiated after the police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in 2014 and subsequent unrest. It requires the department to “develop and implement a plan for broader collection of stop, search, ticketing, and arrest data that requires collection of data on all stop and post-stop activity, as well as location and demographic information.”
One of the components of LEFTA’s software, the PASS Profiling Accountability Software, allows Ferguson Police to do that by providing an easy format to keep track of statistical data about the race, gender and age of people involved in traffic stops. All of those data points, through the new software, can be recorded by officers along with the standard time, location and reason for traffic stops.
Moss said that this profiling accountability software will allow the department to look at traffic stops more comprehensively than they’ve done before. Given that, according to a Missouri Attorney General report issued this year, black drivers in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be pulled over than their white counterparts, the possibility of using LEFTA’s software to lessen the impact of racial discrimination in traffic stops and arrests is particularly relevant here.
In Ferguson specifically, that disparity is even worse: according to a report released by Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, black drivers were over 70 times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over within Ferguson city limits.
By using LEFTA’s donated software, Moss hopes to make his department “more accountable.” To aid in that accountability, another aspect of the software is the FACTS Use of Force Reporting function, which allows for “more than 160” data points to be collected about the arrests made by specific officers. The system will flag officers who have been involved in an unusually high number of use of excessive force incidents. Then, police department leadership can monitor those officers more closely and decide what actions to take to improve those officers’ behavior.
Donating software to the Ferguson Police Department is not new for LEFTA. Only three weeks after the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. and the subsequent protests, the company – which is run by former police officers – donated another program of theirs to all Missouri local police departments free of charge, according to a 2014 LEFTA press release. The SHIELD program did many of the same things that the current software donation does – the 2014 software keeps track of the use of force by police officers, and flags police officers who use force a certain number of times within a specific time period, much like the current software.
The new LEFTA software will not immediately create any policy changes within the Ferguson Police Department upon being implemented. However, the better records-keeping, improved ease of report-filing, and early alert system to identify racially biased officers could lead to recognition of systemic patterns of discrimination.
“The collective data provides a very comprehensive picture of what the agency is doing and how they’re enforcing the law,” said Selzer of LEFTA Systems, “and therefore allows leadership, based on seeing that data, to act accordingly.”
