By Shaun Rundle, Legislative & Region Affairs Representative

Beginning on January 1, 2017 departments will be required to submit annual reports to DOJ on incidents where use of force or discharge of a firearm was committed by an officer or civilian. Over the last year, the Attorney General’s office has been formulating the online reporting portal, and most agencies across California may have been contacted about the reporting system, named URSUS. Reporting contains specific data criteria and all law enforcement agencies in California are required to enroll. Since the announcement of URSUS, CPOA has engaged with DOJ on responses and concerns regarding the reporting and public release of the data.

Assembly Bill (AB) 71 was passed in 2015, but the below provisions do not take effect until January 1, 2017. It contains the following directives for use of force reporting into URSUS:

Each law enforcement agency to report all instance when a peace officer employed by that agency is involved in the following:

• An incident involving the shooting of a civilian by a peace officer.
• An incident involving the shooting of a peace officer by a civilian.
• An incident in which the use of force by a peace officer against a civilian results in serious bodily injury or death.
• An incident in which use of force by a civilian against a peace officer results in serious bodily injury or death.

In addition, each incident reported shall include all of the following:

• The gender, race, and age of each individual who was shot, injured, or killed.
• The date, time, and location of the incident.
• Whether the civilian was armed, and, if so, the type of weapon.

Data reported into URSUS will be published at the agency level via the Department of Justice’s already-existing OpenJustice portal. At the briefings noted above, CPOA and other law enforcement stakeholders made sure that DOJ was aware of concerns to make the URSUS reporting similar to how data will be reported on vehicle stops, per the passage of AB 953 in 2015. We also expressed our concerns about making sure that URSUS included options for reporting 5150’s, as a large population of citizen altercations resulting in force fall under that category.

Many of your agencies may have already been contacted by DOJ for URSUS reporting, and if during those negotiations there are any concerns or issues that CPOA can work with DOJ on, please feel free to contact Shaun Rundle at srundle@cpoa.org or 916-520-2248.