New Bill Says It’s Time To Track The Data On Police Shootings

Two Democratic sen­a­tors intro­duced a bill this week aimed at chang­ing what for­mer Attorney General Eric Holder once called the “unac­cept­able” lack of data on the sub­ject of police shootings.

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D‑Calif.) and Cory Booker (D‑N.J.) on Tuesday intro­duced the Police Reporting of Information, Data and Evidence Act (PRIDE), which would require states to report to the Justice Department any time a law enforce­ment offi­cer is involved in a shoot­ing and any instance where an offi­cer or a civil­ian is seri­ous­ly hurt or killed as a result of the use of force. States would also have to report details like the age, race and loca­tion of any vic­tims; whether or not the civil­ians present were armed; and how many civil­ians and offi­cers were involved.

“Too many mem­bers of the pub­lic and police offi­cers are being killed, and we don’t have reli­able sta­tis­tics to track these trag­ic inci­dents,” Boxer said in a state­ment Tuesday. “This bill will ensure that we know the full extent of the prob­lem so we can save lives on all sides.”

There is cur­rent­ly no com­pre­hen­sive fed­er­al pro­gram that col­lects data on law enforce­ment-involved shoot­ings and use of force, mak­ing that infor­ma­tion essen­tial­ly impos­si­ble to find. The FBI’s uni­form crime report only includes police-involved killings that are con­sid­ered “jus­ti­fi­able homi­cides” — that is, killings that law enforce­ment offi­cials con­sid­er excus­able, like a civil­ian who is killed while com­mit­ting a felony. These inci­dents are report­ed by police on a vol­un­tary basis, mean­ing there are like­ly many more that hap­pen than we have an offi­cial record of.

In her state­ment Tuesday, Boxer not­ed that there’s also no com­pre­hen­sive report­ing on how many offi­cers are killed in the line of duty. This year, 54 offi­cers have been killed in the line of duty, 14 of them shot and killed by sus­pects, accord­ing to num­bers from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Meanwhile, thus far in 2015, U.S. police have shot and killed at least 385 peo­ple, or about 2.5 peo­ple a day, accord­ing to a recent Washington Post esti­mate. And The Guardian — which is mak­ing its own sus­tained effort to track police-killing sta­tis­tics — puts the year-to-date total even high­er, at 408.

On Monday, The Guardian unveiled a project called “The Counted,” a crowd­sourced data­base that aims to tal­ly police- and oth­er law enforce­ment-involved deaths and record vital details of the incidents.

The data­base culls news from local reports, sub­mit­ted tips (ver­i­fied by The Guardian) and oth­er pub­lic data. Guardian reporter Jon Swaine told The Huffington Post that the info arrives “in drips and drops,” mean­ing that entries may be added, removed or revised as new infor­ma­tion becomes available.

Swaine said the April shoot­ing of South Carolina man Walter Scott offers one exam­ple of how an entry can morph as new details come to light: Initial reports based on police infor­ma­tion paint­ed a dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture than the real­i­ty the pub­lic saw a day lat­er when video of the inci­dent was released.

Though law enforce­ment-involved shoot­ings have cap­tured the most media atten­tion, Swaine said “The Counted” will also include cas­es like that of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray, who died from a spinal cord injury sus­tained dur­ing a vio­lent ride in a police van.

Swaine said The Guardian hopes “The Counted” will bol­ster efforts by local media, res­i­dents and oth­ers look­ing to bet­ter under­stand fatal police and civil­ian encoun­ters. Already, he said, out­lets in Los Angeles and New Orleans have used the tool to explore their own local num­bers. He not­ed that the map­ping tool can also help users see when inci­dents are clus­tered in par­tic­u­lar geo­graph­ic areas of a city.

Swaine said The Guardian plans to keep “The Counted” going at least through the rest of the year.

“[Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner and I] were both sur­prised that there was no com­pre­hen­sive report of police fatal­i­ties,” said Swaine. “It was a gap we could fill and it fit with The Guardian’s, what you might call, ethos. It’s part of The Guardian’s tra­di­tion: skep­ti­cism of author­i­ty, skep­ti­cism of the police force.“New Bill Says It’s Time To Track The Data On Police Shootings