Kanya Bennett serves as a Legislative Counsel in the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. She writes—One Year Later: We Still Don’t Know How Many Shot by Police
One year ago today, the White House released The Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing — 116 pages of recommendations meant to address the epidemic of killings of unarmed Black and brown people by the police officers sworn to protect them. The report was supposed to be a blueprint for reforms in policing this country has needed for decades. Yet 12 months after its publication, our government still can’t even come up with the number of people who have been killed by U.S. police.
“[E]mbarrassing and ridiculous”—that’s how the director of the FBI characterized our government’s lack of data on killings by police. He also said it’s “unacceptable” that we have to rely on two newspapers — The Guardian and The Washington Post — to get national estimates for these statistics.
The federal government is the official record keeper of shark attacks and farm animals. Certainly police shootings are of national significance, too, and should be documented by the very entity that provides dollars and resources to local police. How can we start to address a national crisis if our own government can’t measure it?
This year’s tallies by the Guardian and the Post are roughly the same as they were at this point last year — the problems with our police departments’ use of force aren’t going away. [...]
For too long, the Department of Justice has allowed police departments to opt out of sharing their data with the federal government, even when these departments receive federal funds. As we and 81 other organizations urged the Department of Justice in March, it’s time to require any department that gets a piece of the annual $4 billion in criminal justice grants it gives to state and local agencies to collect and report data on police-community encounters. The Justice Department should also issue regulations for theDeaths in Custody Reporting Act, so we know what “custody” means and what happens when departments don’t comply.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Gallup: Moderates, liberals flee GOP:
Gallup is out with an interesting new survey showing where the Republican Party has lost the most ground over the past eight years, and conservatives aren't going to like what it reveals.
The narrative spun by the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Dick Cheneys of the world is that the GOP's problem is that it hasn't been conservative enough, and that rather than moderate its policies, the GOP should focus its rebuilding efforts on the party's conservative base.
But the Gallup survey tells a completely different story. According to Gallup, only 1 percent of self-described conservatives have left the Republican Party over the past eight years. In fact, the only group more loyal to Republicans were those who attend church weekly. Meanwhile, even as Republicans held their conservative base together, 9% of moderates and 8% of liberals left the party.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, the long process of moving beyond the procedural analysis of the Nevada convention gives way to the long process of analyzing the fallout. Greg Dworkin and David Waldman take turns aggravating everyone, even though they no longer think any chairs were thrown.
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