Federal officials will start asking cops to report on every violent interaction they have with citizens, roughly 22 years after Congress first instructed the Department of Justice to collect data on excessive force incidents from law enforcement agencies.
The FBI will conduct a pilot program in the coming months, solicit feedback from stakeholders, and then launch a full system for collecting use-of-force information for all types of incidents in the new year, the department said in a release.
The new data efforts are meant to build on other recent work by President Obama’s team, including the Police Data Initiative launched by the White House last year and a database on fatal encounters with cops that was mandated by Congress in 2014.
That work is one part of a broader push to overhaul law enforcement systems around the country, as Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta noted in a speech Friday at Howard University’s law school.
“[O]ur goal is not minor change but lasting, comprehensive reform that transforms relations between police and communities. And — not overnight, but over time — to change culture,” she said. “As others have said, ‘culture eats policy for lunch.’”
But the odds are longer for this new effort to collect nationwide stats on bodily force, less-lethal weapons, and other non-fatal police violence. And expansive, painstaking data sifting by journalists, such as the Washington Post database project that earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year, will likely remain the best source of public information about how law enforcement agencies use and abuse their authority over the public.
The 2014 law lets Washington impose financial penalties on agencies that don’t comply on the fatal encounters data project. The new project unveiled Thursday by Attorney General Loretta Lynch does not have the same teeth.
Police agencies will have little incentive — beyond their own sense of ethics — to share full, honest numbers on how often their cops use violence to subdue citizens. The voluntary nature of the system leaves wiggle room for agencies to hold back numbers on unjustified violence while sharing only the numbers that make them look good.
Agencies’ freedom to spin their reputations through data they generate and control is endemic to almost any effort to catalog police violence. Even the older police killings data collection effort has fallen prey to these deficiencies, as a coalition of 96 different organizations noted in criticisms of that project earlier this month.
But the government is trying — and after more than two decades of slack effort, that itself represents a significant improvement.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is notorious for radically toughening criminal penalties and flinging heaps of new resources at cops with few restrictions. But it also included a provision ordering the Department of Justice to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and publish an annual report on the numbers.
The billions of dollars for police, prisons, and equipment flowed. The draconian sentencing laws rapidly filled and over-filled all those new prisons. But the data reporting rule languished until after the turn of the century.
Even then, the department only collected data on police killings, not all excessive force incidents. The numbers it published cover the seven-year stretch from 2003 to 2009 — and they dramatically undercount police killings.
Thursday’s announcement that the department will now solicit comprehensive use-of-force data is therefore a significant step forward, but from a starting position that’s far behind both the times and the law. The department did not respond to requests for comment about it.