DOJ urged to improve data collection on deaths in police custody

More than 60 groups are calling on the Obama administration to sharpen its plan for collecting data on deaths in police custody.

In a letter to Department of Justice (DOJ) officials this week, 67 national and local criminal justice, civil rights, human rights, faith-based, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ and open-government organizations said the agency needs to strengthen how it plans to implement the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act (DICRA).

{mosads}The 2014 law, which requires police departments across the country to disclose details to the federal government about custodial deaths, was created in response to a troubling lack of reliable data.

The groups claim the DOJ’s plan to implement the rule, however, lacks accountability to ensure state and local police are actually providing the data.

They also claim that it fails to condition federal funding on adequate reporting and relies too heavily on media reports instead of police departments for the information. They said the law also lacks clarity on how DICRA applies to federal agencies and fails to clearly define “custody.”

Wader Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called the loopholes in the regulations “cavernous.”

“Police departments should report deaths in custody when they happen; it should be that simple,” Henderson said in a statement. “But these regulations make it clear that DOJ would rather bend over backwards to accommodate police departments’ dysfunction or reluctance.”

In the letter, the groups, which included Human Rights Watch, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Immigrant Justice Center, said there should be a financial penalty for states that do not report deaths.

“The financial penalty is critical to successful implementation of DICRA as voluntary reporting programs on police-community encounters have failed,” their letter said. “Reportedly, only 224 of the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies reported approximately 444 fatal police-shootings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2014[5], though we have reason to believe that annual numbers of people killed by police exceeds 1,000.”