The problem with investigating each police killing individually

Paul Heaton, an economist who analyzes the criminal-justice system, argued in a 2017 essay that an NTSB for police killings would offer many advantages over the status quo. Perhaps the most significant is the ability a federal agency would have to learn from incidents all over America. “Often system-level factors that contribute to unwanted outcomes are only apparent after aggregating across multiple incidents, each of which appear unique and idiosyncratic when viewed in isolation,” he wrote, noting that “each locality has a limited set of incidents from which to draw useful lessons,” while “aggregation of information can likely produce better insights.” Another advantage, he argued, is that a federal agency’s investigative protocols could be consistent from case to case—unlike a local district attorney who, in deciding whether to seek the conviction of a police officer “is making procedural decisions in real time while investigating an incident that differs in important ways from more routine investigative business.”