Despite mounting public concern about police abuse, police departments, state agencies and the Department of Justice itself keep few records on police use of force in tracking suspects. What figures do exist suggest California's cops are the most dangerous. PNS correspondent Liz Enochs is a Bay Area investigative reporter.

Just how dangerous are America's police?

The question has taken on added urgency since the O.J. Simpson trial -- the "Dallas Morning News" called Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman "the poster child for police misconduct". But given the information out there on police use of force, there's no way to answer it.

One trend is clear: In California, police are more dangerous than anywhere else.

California cops kill more people than cops in any other state. Roughly a third of the nation's justifiable homicides by police occur here, according to statistics from the U.S. and California Departments of Justice. And Los Angeles alone accounts for thirteen percent of the total. Since 1990, cops in California's four largest urban areas have been involved in more than 800 shooting incidents, killing nearly 300 people.

But justifiable homicides by police -- defined by the Justice Department as "the killing of a felon during the commission of a felony" -- tells only a small part of the story. To find out how punchy local police officers get when they're chasing down suspects, one needs to know how often police use chokeholds, pepper sprays, batons, stun guns, firearms, fists.

And the Department of Justice -- the nation's central clearinghouse for statistics on crime -- doesn't track this kind of use of force by police. Nor, for that matter, do state agencies, let alone many local police and sheriff's departments.

"It's a POST (Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training) suggestion that (law enforcement agencies) keep use-of-force reports every time an officer uses force that could cause serious injury or death," says Skip Murphy, president of the Peace Officer Research Association of California. But, he adds, there's no law requiring agencies to file such reports.

Without any statistical records, would-be probers of police misconduct must wade through piles of reports and do the math on their own. Since police brass decide whether or not to make such reports available to the public, probers may also be told "it's none of your business."

The result? You can pretty much forget about finding out whether police are more likely to assault black suspects than latino or white suspects, let alone whether police use of force has increased since the three-strikes-you're-out law went into effect.

"It's amazing how little is known about the nature and extent of police use of force, considering how hot a topic it is," says Tony Narr, a research associate with the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C.

Others say the failure on the part of many law enforcement agencies to collect such data indicates a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach to problems with police misconduct. "If they compiled the data," says John Crew, head of the California ACLU's police accountability project, "then they'd have to do something about it. Ignorance is bliss in this case."

Crew and other police watchdogs point out that just making the information available in itself won't solve the problem. It has to lead to greater public pressure that in turn helps create police review boards in communities without such organizations, or strengthen the powers of already-established bodies like San Francisco's Office of Citizen Complaints or Oakland's Citizens' Police Review Board.

Lacking accurate data on police use of force, citizens often pay little attention to the problem until high-profile cases of police misconduct spur them to act. Then, focused public outrage can result in quick, decisive action by local officials faced with potential public relations disasters. Oakland, Ca., is a case in point.

In 1979, after nine African-American men were killed by Oakland police within 12 months, several thousand citizens banded together to demand reform. The mayor appointed a task force charged with creating a review board, and the board itself was established in early 1980 to deal with complaints of police brutality.

But how effective is it? Out of more than 900 complaints filed with the Oakland review board since 1980, only 53 have been sustained -- and only 16 since 1986. "In general (review boards are) pretty ineffective bodies," says Arun Rasiah, head of the police and jail accountability project for the American Friends Service Committee in Oakland. "They don't have much power, and often it's the police or the mayor's office which controls them."

Ultimately, police must be required to share information about the investigative process when officers are accused of misconduct, argues Ronald Hampton, a 23-year police veteran and Executive Director of the National Black Police Officers Association in Washington, D.C.

To help break the "code of silence" that keeps cops from speaking out when colleagues abuse their power as police officers, the Association will convene a tribunal on police misconduct in early November. "People talk about how the Mark Fuhrmans are the minority in police departments, and that's true," says Hampton. "But what is a majority are the cops who hear that s... and don't say anything and don't do anything about it."