The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department does not track use-of-force to the same extent the Police Department does in the city of Sacramento.
The sheriff's department tracked 280 cases in which deputies used force between 2012 and 2014. But, that does not include the number of cases in which deputies used control or submission holds to gain compliance from suspects.
The figure might not be insignificant.
Police officers in the city of Sacramento used physical force 323 times during the same time period.
Sheriff Scott Jones says his department has recently begun to discuss better ways to track use of force.
"It requires a change in policies, practice, how are we going to mark, capture what sort of criteria are we gonna use to report the data, how are we going to report it, what do we report it into. hows the data extracted from there. So it is a software solution. But, to say that, really kind of over-simplifies all the protocols, procedures, processes."
Sacramento Police Chief Sam Somers says his department's policy is to track all use of force.
"We have software that's called Blue Team that we use and what it is is everybody up the chain of command all the way up to the division commander reviews it whether it's videotape or statements, whatever, and they actually do recommendations on it if there's issues. If it's a training issue, if it's something that should be referred to internal affairs and it gets referred that way. If not, it's just something we have as a category to look at it."
The police department and the sheriff's department each made more than 50,000 arrests over the last three years.
The police department made 5,100 more arrests than the sheriff's department in that time.
CapRadio provides a trusted source of news because of you. As a nonprofit organization, donations from people like you sustain the journalism that allows us to discover stories that are important to our audience. If you believe in what we do and support our mission, please donate today.
