The Justice Department says it plans next year to use a new database to track the use of force in police shootings, something many may have assumed the federal government was already doing.
In the last two years following a series of high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, such federal data apparently hasn't been available. As FBI Director James Comey said at a House committee hearing last month, per the Chicago Tribune, without the new data “we’re driven entirely by anecdote, and that’s a very bad place to be.”
On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised the Obama administration for its new plan, referring to the use-of-force tracking as a vital tool in the effort to stop violent confrontations between law enforcement and community members and bring back a system of trust, The Hill noted.
“In talking about law enforcement and civilian interactions, if you don’t have a sense of the numbers, of the types of interactions…[then] it’s very, very hard to prescribe a problem and find a solution for it,” Lynch told an audience at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service in Washington.
Lynch said the new tracker aims to collect “all types” of interaction between police and civilians, including confrontations that aren’t lethal like traffic stops, for example.
“Are they on the rise? Are they consistent with where they’ve been before?…You want to know, how does that compare to last year or the year before?” she said. “Having that kind of data will help us not only see the problem,” but more importantly know how to address the problem.
According to the Tribune, the FBI and other Justice Department leaders agree with the notion that better information on police use of force is extremely important in building community trust and promoting transparency.
The Tribune said the FBI plans to start a pilot program early next year that would gather use-of-force data, even including information on cases that don’t end in death.
The earliest participants are expected to be the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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