FBI Monitoring of Police Use-of-Force Founders on Lack of Data - The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation might have to eliminate a program that aims to track how often law-enforcement officers across the U.S. use force against citizens because too few agencies have submitted their statistics, according to a newly released government watchdog report.
Spurred by a series of high-profile police killings of Black people and minorities, the FBI in 2016 said it would build a first-ever national database to better collect information about deadly police encounters and other cases in which law-enforcement officers use force.
The initiative, fully launched in 2019, was required to obtain data encompassing 60% of law-enforcement officers nationwide to meet a quality standard set by the Office of Management and Budget. But having never met that threshold, the program hasn’t released any use-of-force statistics and stands at risk of being shut down at the end of 2022, according to the report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office.
“Due to insufficient participation from law-enforcement agencies, the FBI faces risks that it may not meet the participation thresholds established…and therefore may never publish use-of-force incident data from the collection,” the report says.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the report, which examined fiscal years 2016 to 2020. The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. It said on its website that so far this year, it has collected data representing 54% of local, state and federal officers in the U.S. Those officers were part of the roughly 7,500 law-enforcement agencies that provided data to the bureau out of the more than 18,000 queried across the country, according to the FBI website.
According to the GAO report, data submitted represented 44% of officers in 2019 and 55% last year.
The GAO report said the data the FBI compiled covered 44% of officers in 2019 and 55% last year. Bureau officials told investigators they knew the high participation standards would put the program at risk because they believed law-enforcement agencies may be reluctant to share information on how often their officers use force.
Participation is voluntary in the program, called the National Use-of-Force Data Collection. It asks agencies to submit statistics and detailed information on how many times officers fire their guns at people and how often they use force that causes death or injury. The initiative asks for facts not just on the officers involved but the subjects, times and dates and demographics.
The program is in jeopardy as the Biden administration has made a priority of overhauling law-enforcement practices both locally and federally, with the Justice Department launching broad civil-rights investigations of police departments and directing federal agents to wear body cameras and limit the use of tactics such as chokeholds and no-knock raids.
While bipartisan talks in Congress to improve police accountability ended in September with no deal, President Biden has said his administration would continue to push ahead with efforts to improve policing, including possible executive actions that could address better data collection.
The report included a response from the Justice Department, which told GAO officials that “the FBI believes the agreed upon thresholds will be met to allow the data collection to continue, and is taking steps to increase participation in data collection efforts.” It noted that the bureau had recently sent letters to agencies encouraging them to get involved.
If the FBI can generate 59% participation, it can publish limited information, about injuries and the type of force used, for example.
The report also faults the Justice Department for failing over the past five years to acquire and publish a summaries of statistics on the use of excessive force by law enforcement, as required by a 1994 crime bill, saying officials neglected to assign roles and responsibilities for doing so.
The agency also agreed to improve on that, according to the report.
Write to Sadie Gurman at [email protected]
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source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-monitoring-of-police-use-of-force-founders-on-lack-of-data-11639073896
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