The American Civil Liberties Union and nearly 100 other civil rights groups are pressuring the Justice Department to force state and local law enforcement agencies to report to the FBI in more detail about deaths that occur when people are in police custody.
In a notice published in the Federal Register in August, DOJ announced that it would be streamlining how state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as medical examiner’s or coroner’s offices, report that a person died while in police custody. However, it is hard to get the more than 18,000 agencies to voluntarily participate.
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Now, the groups are proposing in a letter to the Justice Department that grants be withheld from the police departments that refuse to report the data.
“The federal government awards close to $4 billion in such grants annually, and every discretionary grant should be conditioned upon providing data,” the letter says.
The letter noted that though some publications like the Guardian and the Washington Post have dedicated themselves to tracking deaths in police custody, they still don’t have completely accurate and thorough data from the federal government to ensure that the number of deaths in police custody is correct.
Of the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide that are supposed to report the data, only 224 voluntarily reported any fatal police shootings to the FBI last year.
“Certain media outlets have been critical to understanding police-community encounters over the past year, but it is unlikely that national media attention and resources can remain focused on policing indefinitely,” the letter says. “Thus, relying primarily on media accounts and statistics is an inadequate method of collecting data to determine the circumstances under which people die while in law enforcement custody.”
Other groups signing the letter were the NAACP, Human Rights Watch, the Drug Policy Alliance, the AFL-CIO, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
