A key government accountability agency is less than pleased with the Justice Department’s data collection involving excessive force incidents.
The Government Accountability Office released a report on Tuesday that found that the Department of Justice‘s efforts to publish data on the use of excessive force has been lacking.
“[Between 2016 and 2020], DOJ didn’t consistently publish an annual summary of excessive force data as required by law,” says the GAO. “This data is crucial to efforts to reduce excessive force, according to law enforcement and civil rights organization representatives, and others we interviewed.”
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While the DOJ did publish some data on law enforcement’s use of force, the department failed to publish an annual summary of data on excessive force in those years. This annual summary is required by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The GAO claims that this is because “officials did not assign roles and responsibilities for doing so.”
The GAO also found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated a new effort to collect data on law enforcement’s use of force. The bureau could not meet the thresholds set by the Office of Management and Budget due to “insufficient participation by law enforcement agencies.”
While the DOJ does not maintain a grant program specifically focused on reducing excessive force, the GAO says it identified six programs that award grants to agencies taking action to reduce excessive use of force. These grants spent $201.6 million between 2016 and 2020 as awards for reducing law enforcement’s excessive force.
The GAO report offers 11 recommendations to fix these issues. These include the attorney general assigning responsibility for collecting data to the proper components, the FBI director assessing alternative data collection strategies, and DOJ leadership requiring staff to “use information from allegations within the department’s jurisdiction received from across DOJ to identify potential patterns of systemic law enforcement misconduct and analyze trends.”
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The DOJ has concurred with nine of the recommendations, the GAO says.
This report arrives eight months after Attorney General Merrick Garland rescinded a Trump administration order limiting consent decrees as a tool to force police departments to change. This order restrained the DOJ’s civil rights division from launching probes into police departments connected to significant shootings, including the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.
