Federal
Bureau of Investigation to Launch New System Counting People Killed by Police
Phil Peters
The Washington Post and The
Guardian began compiling data on violent law enforcement encounters earlier
this year.
More than 900 civilians were
fatally shot by police so far this year, according to The Post's own analysis,
while the Guardianhas put the tally at 1,058 deaths.
David Klinger, a former police
officer and professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, who has
advocated for better data for more than a decade, said he was pleased to hear
of the new system but skeptical about its implementation. The program only
collects data on the number of so-called "justifiable homicides"
reported by police, as well as information about the felonious killing and
assault of law enforcement officers.
The Post's database has also
motivated the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS,) another Justice Department
agency, to change the way it tracks police-related deaths. The program will
still rely on voluntary reporting, however, because the agency doesn't have the
authority to compel local police departments to comply with its requests for
data.
The proposal has not yet been
signed off by FBI Director James Comey pending the agency's legal review.
This is why they are starting a
project on tracking not only fatal shootings, but also any type of incident in
which a police officer causes a civilian serious injury, regardless of the
means, whether they use pepper spray or stun guns or their fists. "People
want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using
force". It is now the highest priority, " he added. The Guardian
reports that "Officials said statisticians were intending to count deadly
incidents involving physical force, Tasers and blunt weapons used by officers
as well as firearms and that they planned to begin gradually publishing some
more information about fatal incidents as soon as 2016".
In a statement provided to the
Guardian, the Federal Bureau of Investigation explained that there was an
obvious need for "robust and complete information about encounters between
law enforcement officers and citizens that result in a use of force".
Morris said the leaders of the
nation's largest police organizations have agreed for the first time to lobby
local departments to produce the data.
Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin
C. Roessler Jr., a member of the advisory board, said police organizations
"will be taking a leadership role to use peer pressure to get all
departments to report on this".
"For a lot of departments,
it's not like they were actively against [releasing data], they just didn't
really know how to do it", Clarence Wardell, a Presidential Innovation
Fellow who works on the White House's Police Data Initiative said at an event
at Harvard's Kennedy School in November.
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