Plan is to set up national public database

CSU law student Katrice Williams

Cleveland State University law student Katrice Williams is one of 39 recently named fellows of the American Bar Association’s Education Police Practices Consortium. All 39 have been tasked with researching public data about local and state law enforcement agencies.

Williams is collecting information about the Cleveland police department, the Cleveland State campus police, the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court, and other relative agencies. The information she and other fellows collect will be compiled into one central database of information, accessible to all Consortium members and members of the public. Although the fellowships are only for a year, the Consortium members envision this as a multi-year project with successive classes of fellowship classes expanding the database.

Williams will also be looking at the city’s budget allocation for the police department, the university’s expenditure on police and use of force policies, according to a report in the ABA Journal.

The consortium was created by several dozen law school deans in 2020 in response to police killings and use of force in primarily black communities and in recognition of the need for a centralized database for a lot of this information, especially at the national level. The data could lead to better policing policies and practices. So far, 59 schools are participating.

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