Federal Law Ordering US AG To Gather Data On Police Excessive Force Has Been Ignored For 20 years

[n2doc]

Are police officers getting worse or is this apparent increase in excessive force nothing more than a reflection of the increase in unofficial documentation (read: cameras) and public scrutiny? What we do know is that as crime has gone down, police forces have escalated their acquisitions of military gear and weapons. With options for lethal and less-lethal force continually expanding, it seems that deployment of force in excess of what the situation requires has become the new normal, but it's tough to find hard data that backs up these impressions.

One of the reasons we don't have data on police use of excessive force is because compiling this information relies on law enforcement agencies being forthcoming about these incidents. Generally speaking, it takes FOIA requests and lawsuits to obtain any data gathered by individual police departments. This shouldn't be the case. In fact, as AllGov reports, this lack of data violates a federal law.

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected.

And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that. The work of collecting the data was shuffled off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which made a few efforts at collecting data and put together a report in 2001, but has produced nothing since.

Unsurprisingly, law enforcement agencies don't want to talk about it, and the entity in charge of compiling the data seems entirely uninterested in doing the job. Even if the data was collected as the statute requires, much of it would still be questionable. For one, it relies on self-reporting by entities that see zero benefit in exposing their officers' wrongdoing. For another, excessive force incidents previously recorded may turn out to be "justified" later, either by internal investigations or via the judicial system.


more

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/federal-law-ordering-us-attorney-general-to-gather-data-police-excessive-force-has-been-ignored-20-years.shtml

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Holder is not any better than Gonzales.

Don't any of these guys actually do their jobs?

[hootinholler]

3. IMHO Holder is worse

Mainly because he was appointed by a Democratic President.

From Wall St to Main St I'm hard pressed to see what he has accomplished that makes life better for the average Joe.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Tell me about it.

The feds have ignored quite a bit of abusive local practices, that over the years have grown in conviction and allowed police and city governments to foster the kind of communities that would result in the abusive actions we are seeing of late.

[L0oniX]

4. K & R

[johnnyreb]

5. K&R

[Demeter]

6. ...so why start now? (Speak in complete sentences, young man!)

In point of fact, this is a task that now should be taken over by a dedicated website on the internet, with sufficient documentation to present a dossier of each incident: names, addresses, photos, medical records, court records, etc.

Compile it, reduce it to a searchable, anonymous database of facts,

THEN beat Congress over the head with it, and Justice, and the Courts, and ultimately, the voters.

[woo me with science]

7. K&R

[woo me with science]

8. kick

[KG]

9. this is not an oversight or accident.

[Enthusiast]

11. You are correct.

[indepat]

10. We can take comfort that a Democrat has been the president in only 12 of those 20 years

Whew!

[Enthusiast]

12. Kicked and recommended!

Thank you, n2doc. Who knew?

[Heidi]

13. Kick!

[bigtree]

14. k&r