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Police data consultant tells Dallas oversight board disparities reflect reported suspects, not population
Summary
Bob Scales, a consultant who helped build Dallas PD's force-analysis system, told the Community Police Oversight Board that raw comparisons of arrests to city population can mislead; he urged the board to use risk-adjusted benchmarks such as reported crime suspects and incident context to test for bias and highlighted ZIP-code arrest hotspots.
Bob Scales, chief executive of Police Strategies LLC, told the Community Police Oversight Board on Jan. 14 that racial disparities in Dallas arrest and use-of-force data are real but that simple comparisons to city population don't identify their cause.
Scales, who said he built the force-analysis system used by Dallas Police Department, told the board that analysts must consider context: whether contacts began from calls for service or officer-initiated stops, suspect behavior, age and gender, and whether arrests are linked to crimes reported by community members. He recommended using risk-adjusted benchmarks such as reported crime suspects, not raw census population, to test for evidence of bias.
That approach, Scales said, changes interpretation. "If 60% of reported crime suspects…
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