Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Thursday that the Department of Justice will track and record national police-involved shootings.
After nearly three years of protests stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement, the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation will start collecting data from police departments and sheriff offices across the country. There have been an estimated 847 police shootings in 2016, per The Guardian‘s Counted project.
According to an Oct. 13 CNN report, the new proposal, called the National Use of Force Data Collection, will be enacted early 2017.
“Accurate and comprehensive data on the use of force by law enforcement is essential to an informed and productive discussion about community-police relations,” Lynch said yesterday. “… The Department of Justice will continue to work alongside our local, state, tribal and federal partners to ensure that we put in place a system to collect data.”
If police departments fail to hand over figures showing police-involved shootings, they will face a fine. The Associated Press reports that Lynch will start the pilot program with the largest law enforcement agencies, including major federal agencies such as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In addition, the attorney general wants these agencies to report deaths in their custody.
This new proposal piggybacks off the 2014 Death in Custody Reporting Act. This act attempted to collect data showing deaths in custody, but it did not require data involving non-lethal uses of force interactions, per CNN.
