Details here. Any downside? Any Constitutional issues? There’s not much data on this nation-wide, much less to compare locality to locality – this would give the country a great opportunity to determine which departments might have a problem, and which ones might be doing things very well with regards to shootings.
Great proposed bill -- require police departments to report data on shootings to Justice Department-
I see that as a problem. Law enforcement agencies usually don’t like to give out much in the way of detail for ongoing investigations.
Also, who gets to define what the standardized form & data necessary are?
I assume the local police department just has to eat the cost of the reporting. And this kind of thing is a matter of state law, not federal law - where in the Constitution does it give the Justice Department jurisdiction over locally elected officials like sheriffs?
Regards,
Shodan
The Federal government has been compiling the uniform crime reports for almost a century. Police departments appear to submit all sorts of reports to the DoJ.
And if a police department doesn’t want to submit data, then they should not be eligible to receive DoJ grants for equipment, or nearly free surplus stuff from DoD. That will convince them to start filling out the paperwork! Nothing in the Constitution says that local police are entitled to that stuff.
It will cost money, but it’s worth it. I think even more data should be gathered, and not just for when someone is killed. Standardize the way data is recorded, then gather as much as possible.
Sounds like it or a very similar bill passed, but I can’t tell if it’s the same one.
Congress can’t force local police departments to give information to the Justice Department. Without reading the text of the bill, I couldn’t say for sure what incentives it outlines to get compliance.
From my five years working for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the way essentially everything works between the Federal government and individual State agencies (over which the Federal government typically has absolutely no authority, although certain special circumstances may apply) is the Federal government gives a shit ton of grants and money in other forms to State/local government. The Federal government has compliance measures in place that usually involve things like data collection and et cetera.
The bureau I worked for was required to give an annual report to the Federal government or we’d lose money for the underlying program I was working in. However, a lot of this stuff sounds neat and tidy but actually isn’t. For complex reasons not worth getting into, the bureau I worked for was over nine years non-compliant with its grant requirements. The consequences? Nothing. The Federal government had never withheld a cent, largely I suspect because there isn’t actually any institutional or political desire to do so, and it was also entirely due to bureaucratic incompetence. If it had been some public issue where a Governor was intentionally spiting the Feds publicly, maybe something would have been done.
The news article is vague on details, but I’m sure it’s constitutional and just has financial incentives to get compliance.
Also of course the efficacy of this will be tied into whether or not a local police force uses Federal funds. These sort of clubs work much more effectively on States than they do municipalities and counties, because the Federal–>State money flow is a lot more universal.
A lot of programs like highway funding and education there is a large amount of dollars every year that automatically go to the States, and while it covers a variable amount of the State’s budget for those items it is usually a pretty important revenue source.
But a lot of individual local governments don’t necessarily receive any meaningful amount of Federal assistance for law enforcement. Such grants are issued through the Office of Justice Projects (part of the DoJ) and looking up the grants issued in Virginia the metro area I live in received $500k. $200k was for community policing, and under the text of the bill iiandyiiii linked to, would be subject to the terms of that act. $300k of it was for victims of human trafficking and provided for by unrelated legislation.
However, my actual local force received no dollars under OJP programs, and thus would have essentially no reason to comply with its mandate. Richmond city police have a budget of $85m/year, so even if you yanked their $200k it’s questionable what impact that would have, particularly since that $200k is specifically for community policing. In a sense the police departments most likely to not bother with the data collection are also the ones whose people probably most need them getting community police program funding. It almost creates a NCLB situation where the schools that need money the most, get penalized, and the schools that already have a lot of money get more.