12/14/2014
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| Mandel Magn |
WASHINGTON — The newly created White House panel on policing will consider establishing a national repository that tracks all manner of civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers. It's part of an effort to re-establish trust between police and the communities they serve, the co-chairman of the committee said.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, tapped by the Obama administration to help bolster law enforcement's standing in the wake of national unrest stirred by a series of killings of young black men by white officers, told USA TODAY that the long-standing gap in police reporting "needs to be addressed.''
"It will be on the table, no question,'' Ramsey said.
The proposal comes just as the Senate passed legislation Wednesday that would require states to report the deaths of all people in law enforcement custody or during arrest to the federal government.
The most prominent record of civilian fatalities — the FBI's annual report of justifiable homicides by police — was described by Ramsey as "hit or miss'' because of its reliance on voluntary reporting by police agencies, a practice that results in a partial accounting.
Ramsey said civilian deaths at the hands of police, which have sparked demonstrations in cities across the nation, need to be tracked as meticulously as institutions now track the circumstances and numbers of police who are killed in the line of duty.
One of the most comprehensive records of police deaths is maintained by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF). The group is supported by a vast pool of retired police officers and others who review death reports in every state, said NLEOMF chairman and CEO Craig Floyd. That information is then provided to a database that is updated daily on the group's website.
"Personally, I think (both police and civilian death counts) ought to be pretty much the same. If you don't have the data, people think you are hiding something,' Ramsey said. "This is something that comes under the header of establishing trust.''
The inequities in the tracking systems for years have rankled criminal justice analysts who say the universe of civilian deaths remains largely unknown.
University of Nebraska criminologist Samuel Walker, who has described the lack of such a repository as a "major failure'' of the criminal justice system, said a national reporting program could finally bring "some solid facts'' to a public discussion that has largely relied on anecdotal reporting.
"This is a critical public health issue,'' Walker said.
DIFFERENT STANDARDS RULE DEATH COUNTS
Every spring, thousands of the nation's police officers flock to Washington, D.C., to pay their respects to colleagues whose lives have been lost in the line of duty.
The candlelight vigil at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial is affixed to the public schedules of the U.S. attorney general and FBI director. They join the solemn ceremony where the names of the newly fallen have been freshly engraved into the memorial's marbleized limestone.
The engravings are the result of the systematic tracking of police deaths that the memorial has researched back to the late 1700s. There is no disputing the merit of the tribute and the necessity of such data — some of it has been used through the years to enhance officer safety.
Yet the sacred memorial and the decades of research stand in stark contrast to the incomplete accounting of people killed by police.
Based on the voluntary data supplied to the FBI, last year's number of justified homicides by police — 461 — was the highest number recorded in nearly two decades. (Those cases and the ones reported in the years before are not audited after they are submitted to the bureau, and the data has conflicted with other independent measures of fatalities at the hands of police.)
During the same time period, according to the memorial fund group, there were 100 police officers who died in the line of duty due to all measurable causes — from electrocution to shootings.
The FBI's 2014 tally of justifiable homicides will not be available until next year, but the running count of officer deaths on the memorial fund website, as of Thursday, already has surpassed last year, at 114. And the number of fatal shootings of officers — 46 — is up 70% from last year. The overall number of fatalities, however, remains far less than the troubling spike in 2007 when there were 191 police deaths. That year was marked by unusually brutal attacks against police, including several incidents in which multiple officers were fatally shot.
Ramsey said that compelling police agencies to report such data may be difficult. "I don't know whether we'll get to a point where we'll be able to paint a portrait of the situation that is 100%,'' he said.
That worry could be eased by the new congressional action, as lawmakers are requiring that state report or risk losing millions of dollars in federal grants. The legislation is awaiting President Obama's signature.
"At a time when our nation is having an important conversation about police encounters that result in the loss of life, we know that hundreds of police-related deaths are unaccounted for in federal statistics,'' said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "Too many communities across our country are losing faith in our justice system. This bill provides a step towards accountability, and it is my hope that it may ultimately lead to restoring some measure of trust in these communities."
As recently as 2012, the nation's largest association of police chiefs and the Justice Department recommended the development of a data collection system that could produce annual national analyses of the use of force by police.
"I strongly support the idea of a national database on incidents involving deadly force by police,'' said Bernard Melekian, a former director of the Justice Department's Community Oriented Policing Services office. "I support it in large measure because I think the facts will show that police seldom use any force to make an arrest and only a fraction of those cases are a level of force likely to produce death or great bodily injury.''
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