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The Center for American Progress reports
Congress [just] passed a bill that could result in complete, national data on police shootings and other deaths in law enforcement custody.
Right now, we have nothing close to that. Police departments are not required to report information about police to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Some do, others don't, others submit it some years and not others or submit potentially incomplete numbers, making it near-impossible to know how many people police kill every year. Based on the figures that are reported to the federal government, ProPublica recently concluded that young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
Under the bill awaiting Obama's signature, states receiving federal funds would be required to report every quarter on deaths in law enforcement custody. This includes not [only] those who are killed by police during a stop, arrest, or other interaction. It also includes those who die in jail or prison. [Additionally,] it requires details about these shootings including gender, race, as well as at least some circumstances surrounding the death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:06PM
Shooting is just the tip of the iceberg - there are a ton of generally not fatal things that cops do 1000x more frequently.
At a minimum there should be standardized tracking of all disciplinary actions to help identify problems, and both the actions and all investigations, even the ones that don't result in discipline should be preserved for the life of all officers involved (not just the career on that specific force, their entire lifetime in order to prevent forces from just playing musical chairs with problem employees).
You would be surprised how often records are simply allowed to expire - anytime you hear a police rep say an officer has no history of problems, the question to ask is how far back the records actually go.