The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Police custody deaths law flouted
Bill signed in 2014, but mandated data not being collected
WASHINGTON — In 2014, President Barack Obama signed into law legislation that required police departments and other law enforcement agencies to report to the federal government the death of any person who died in their custody.
Six years later, the U.S. Department of Justice has still never begun collecting that data although it is mandated to do so by law.
If implemented, the Death in Custody Reporting Act would have produced a national database of instances when people
died while being incarcerated, arrested or detained by police or other law enforcement, long before the death of George Floyd on May 25. No such government database currently exists, although the Federal Bureau of Investigations collects vast amounts of
other crime data.
“The stark staggering fact is that the nation has no idea how Americans die during arrest or in police custody every year,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the lead co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate in 2014. “I will be very blunt: The Department of Justice’s failure to implement the measure has been pathetic... There’s no justification
for the delay. The information is easy to collect if there is the will to collect it.”
In Connecticut, state’s attorneys investigate when police use deadly force. If created, the national database generated from the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act would include more information about deaths in prisons and deaths of individuals in police custody where direct force from an officer was not involved.
The law requires that states report quarterly, and federal agencies report annually, the name, gender, race, ethnicity, and age of the deceased person, as well as the date and time of the death, the location of the death, and the circumstances surrounding the death. In order to ensure cooperation, the law authorized DOJ to withhold up to 10 percent of a specific federal grant from states that did not comply with reporting.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., who introduced the legislation in 2013, wrote to Attorney General William Barr Tuesday, urging him to immediately start amassing the data. Rep. John Larson, D-1, said it was “unacceptable” that DOJ had not already done so after six years.
“Access to grants must
take such data into account,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, said. “The Justice Department has not made the collection of data authorized by this law a priority, and the country is worse off for it.”
Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York City, and Rep. Karen Bass, D-Ca., wrote to the DOJ Inspector General in January to request an investigation into why DOJ had not yet adopted procedures to collect the data or published any reports.
The DOJ Inspector General did investigate the matter in 2018. It found DOJ had considered and abandoned three different reporting mechanisms to collect the data from states since 2016. At the time, DOJ expected to “begin its collection of this data until the beginning of FY 2020,” or roughly October 2019.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether data collection has now begun.
Although the Inspector General found in 2018 that most federal law enforcement agencies had started reporting the deaths in their custody to DOJ, at the time, DOJ had no plans to make the reports public.
The law gave DOJ two years to analyze the data, determine how and if the data could be used to reduce the number of such death and file a report to Congress. The law “required that such a report be submitted to Congress no later than 2 years after December 18, 2014,” the inspector general wrote.
An earlier version of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act passed in 2000 and focused more exclusively on prison confinement deaths. Under that law too, several years passed before states began sending in data and by the time the law expired in 2006, no report was ever released to Congress.
Despite the failed history of data collection under the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act, Democrats in Congress are now pushing to gather more information on police encounters, as weeks of protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the nation.
The Justice in Policing Act would establish a national registry of police officers who have committed misconduct and require state and local law enforcement to report data on use of force, disaggregated by race, sex, age, disability and religion, to the DOJ. Connecticut police do not currently report this data publicly.
Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2, said Friday the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act is another cautionary tale about haphazard government data collection and the importance of Congressional oversight.
“It really shows that passing a bill and having a bill signing ceremony in some ways is only the beginning of the job, not the end of the problem,” Courtney said. “You’ve really got to stay on top of it.”
According to researchers at the organization Fatal Encounters, four individuals have died in police interactions in Connecticut so far in 2020, in addition to 174 in the past five years, based on media reports and some government records.
Police officers in Connecticut have killed 21 people in the last five years, largely by gunfire, according to a Hartford Courant review of use of force investigations.
Eleven of the 21 people shot and killed by police in Connecticut since Jan. 1, 2015 were white, according to a Washington Post database. Three were black, six were Hispanic and one’s race was unknown.
emilie.munson@hearstdc.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson