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Law Requiring Cops To Report How Many People They Shoot Awaits Obama's Signature

posted by Blackmoore on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-many-to-count dept.

"gewg_" writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:00PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:00PM (#126935) Journal

    It was around about here I was going to say something about the rise in police brutality being buried under the rest of the violence stats - my guess is that someone somewhere making enforcement method policy decisions would happily justify the former as responsible for the later - but for some reason all the sites covering these statistics haven't been updated since 2010. Strange...

    Not that strange. Most sites publishing any kind of crime stats are making some use of the FBI's UCR stats. It can take a year or two, sometimes more, for those to be published (For example: it's almost 2015 and the 2013 National Incident-Based Reporting System data has not been released yet.) So for the reports you seek for 2011 or later? FBI's data wouldn't have come in until some time during 2013, and certainly it takes some time for these other organizations to build their own reports based on that data. If they were working faster than the FBI does they could probably have put out something on 2011 by now, but I wouldn't yet say it's *strange* that they haven't. This kind of data is always a few years out of date, simply because it takes a few years to collect an analyze all of it.

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  • (Score: 1) by wantkitteh on Friday December 19 2014, @02:39AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Friday December 19 2014, @02:39AM (#127350) Homepage Journal

    However long it's taking, it's too long.