Protestors against police violence on Black Friday.
Twenty years ago, Congress passed a
bill requiring the U.S. Department of Justice to gather data and report on instances of "excessive" force by the nation's police forces. For some reason, the task of collecting the data soon fell to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. But it stopped in 2001. And no report was ever published.
That may be about to change. As Allie Gross and Bryan Schatz at Mother Jones report, Congress just passed a bill now awaiting the president's signature, the Death in Custody Reporting Act. It mandates that states receiving criminal justice assistance grants annually report all deaths that occur in law enforcement custody, including when an arrest is made. Federal law enforcement will be required under the same law to report every other year on deaths occurring in its custody. This is good news … if it actually happens this time:
Older versions of the Death in Custody Reporting Act have also struggled to compel comprehensive data. The bill passed last week is the reauthorization of the original act, passed in 2000. Initially created in reaction to prison confinement deaths—lawmakers inserted a provision requiring tallies of arrest-related deaths in 2003—that first version accomplished little: Several years passed before states started sending in data, and the bill expired shortly thereafter, in 2006, without a single report having been released. Since then, the provision requiring state counts of arrest-related deaths has stayed on the books—but reporting has never been enforced. Many local law enforcement agencies provide incomplete data, and the Justice Department has published no comprehensive reports in over a decade.
The bill that passed last week aims to force reporting by tying law enforcement funding to cooperation: States that fail to report police-involved killings can lose up to 10 percent of their federal law enforcement grants. However, it's up to the Attorney General to mete out fines. "Hopefully there will be better compliance and enforcement than existed then, and also more cooperation. There's certainly more awareness now about the importance of this data, and much more focus on it," says [Connecticut Sen. Richard] Blumenthal.
Unofficial tallies, like those at the Facebook-based aggregator
Killed by Police, are all we have to go on until the officially mandated reports start appearing a few years down the road. The Facebook site says it takes its data from "Corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The post merely documents the occurrence of a death." As of Nov. 21, the site had counted at least 1,811 people who had died at the hands of police since May 1, 2013.
Those numbers cry out for the legislation contained in the act. But notice the language used by Blumenthal, attorney general for Connecticut for 20 years. "Hopefully" there will be better enforcement by the feds and cooperation by the states. That he should have to inject such a qualifier into the discussion speaks volumes about just how willing American law enforcement agencies are to put themselves under scrutiny even in the case of an act that will depend on self-reporting.