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Forum nameGeneral Discussion
Topic subjectI think the bill is on his desk
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=4&topic_id=12679499&mesg_id=12679819
12679819, I think the bill is on his desk
Posted by bentagain, Thu Dec-18-14 03:09 PM
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/death-custody-reporting-act-police-shootings-ferguson-garner

But if past measures to collect similar data are any indication, it's going to be a long time before Washington reliably keeps a comprehensive database of all citizens who die at the hands of the police. Congress has tried to enact similar laws before: In 1994, a statute passed under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act mandated that the Department of Justice annually gather, report, and publish a summary of public data counting uses of "excessive" force, but nothing much came of the plan. At some point the task of collecting data fell to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a professional organization. They maintained a database until 2001, but have not updated it since. Twenty years later, we have no clear understanding of how many people have been killed by police.

Older versions of the Death in Custody Reporting Act have also struggled to compel comprehensive data. The bill passed last week is the reauthorization of the original act, passed in 2000. Initially created in reaction to prison confinement deaths—lawmakers inserted a provision requiring tallies of arrest-related deaths in 2003—that first version accomplished little: Several years passed before states started sending in data, and the bill expired shortly thereafter, in 2006, without a single report having been released. Since then, the provision requiring state counts of arrest-related deaths has stayed on the books—but reporting has never been enforced. Many local law enforcement agencies provide incomplete data, and the Justice Department has published no comprehensive reports in more than a decade.

The bill that passed last week aims to force reporting by tying law enforcement funding to cooperation: States that fail to report police-involved killings can lose up to 10 percent of their federal law enforcement grants. However, it's up to the attorney general to mete out fines. "Hopefully there will be better compliance and enforcement than existed then, and also more cooperation," Blumenthal says. "There's certainly more awareness now about the importance of this data, and much more focus on it."

Sounds like that won't help anyway

You can't fix this system

it needs to be destroyed.