FBI to launch new system to count people killed by police officers

The FBI plans to overhaul its system for counting the number of deaths caused by police in the US, according to federal officials, and will begin releasing information about deadly encounters involving the use of Tasers and other force, in addition to fatal shootings.

Responding to months of sharp criticism over its existing program for reporting fatal shootings by police officers, the bureau is to unveil a new system that will publish a wider range of data, resembling that currently collected by an ongoing Guardian investigation.

Stephen Fischer, a senior official in the FBI’s criminal justice information services division in West Virginia, said it had “identified a need for more robust and complete information about encounters between law enforcement officers and citizens that result in a use of force”.

Officials said statisticians were intending to count deadly incidents involving physical force, Tasers and blunt weapons used by officers as well as firearms, and that they planned to begin gradually publishing some more information about fatal incidents as soon as 2016.

The bureau has for several years published an annual total of fatal shootings by police officers that are termed “justifiable homicides”. The country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, however, are under no obligation to report any killings by their officers.

The Guardian disclosed in October that only 224 departments reported a killing last year. The FBI’s total number of deaths has ranged from 397 to 461 since 2009.

By Tuesday evening, the Counted, a Guardian database published since 1 June, had recorded 1,058 deaths caused by law enforcement officers so far this year. A Washington Post database restricted to fatal shootings by officers, which has been published since 1 July, had counted 913 of those so far in 2015.

A number of high-profile fatal uses of force by police in the past two years, including those of Eric Garner in New York and Tamir Rice in Ohio, turned out to have been omitted from the FBI’s official record.

James Comey, the director of the FBI, said in October it was “ridiculous and embarrassing” that the Guardian and Washington Post kept better data on the topic than the federal government. “That is not good for anybody,” he said.

Fischer said “such details as age, sex, and race of the officers and subjects” were also likely to be published by the FBI from now on, as well as the circumstances of the encounter and the relationship between the officer and subject.

These details have been collected for years and a decade’s worth of such information was obtained by the Guardian in October. They have not, however, been published among the headline figures of the FBI’s annual count.

The flaws in the FBI’s current system mean that the federal government has no comprehensive record of people killed by police officers, even as a series of controversial deaths have set off protests and rioting in several cities and reopened debates around race and criminal justice among lawmakers.

Democratic members of the US Senate and House of Representatives have proposed legislation mandating police departments around the country to submit data on deaths involving their officers. The House plan raises the possibility of police departments being denied federal grant funding if they do not comply with the law’s demands.

Amid complaints from some smaller police departments in rural areas that they lack the resources to record and submit extensive data, the Senate plan contains provisions for special funding to pay for the collection of information.

A call for better data collection on this subject also featured prominently among the recommendations made by Barack Obama’s task force on 21st century policing task force.

Brittany Packnett, a member of the task force and a campaigner against excessive force by police, said the announcement should be just “the very first step” in official efforts to reform police accountability throughout the US.

“I am anxious to see what the FBI releases,” said Packnett. “I hope that it is released quickly and I hope, with as much urgency, they will also to do something about it.

“Frankly, I’m glad to see the FBI and another branch of the federal government catching up to what the people have been demanding for a long time.”

An expansion of the FBI’s recording program to include deaths caused by police using means other than firearms is likely to result in the addition of dozens of cases to a system currently limited to shootings.

So far this year, the Counted has recorded the deaths of 48 people who received an electric shock from an officer’s Taser. Another 33 people were killed by collisions with police vehicles. And 40 people have died following physical struggles during arrests or while they were in custody.

The FBI count will ultimately remain voluntary, however, meaning the bureau is likely to remain under pressure to work harder to push departments to report their deadly incidents. “We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” Fischer said earlier this year.

Some campaigners have placed more hopes in a second new government system for counting killings by police, in which officials will proactively seek reports of officer-involved homicides and make follow-up inquiries with local authorities for more information.

This open-source system, which was announced by attorney general Loretta Lynch in October, is being trialled by the department’s bureau of justice statistics and is expected to be expanded into a fully operational program.

Its methodology closely resembles that of the Counted and it, too, is expected to collect data on deadly incidents involving force other than firearms. Officials said the Guardian database was among their sources.

Justice Department officials previously ran a count of “arrest-related deaths”, but the program was shuttered in March 2014 amid concerns about the quality and the extent of data that was being collected. It, too, suffered from departments declining to participate.

A report published by the BJS earlier this year estimated that the FBI’s system is failing to record 54% of deaths caused by police officers. The report’s authors estimated that before being shut down, their own “arrest-related deaths” count had failed to catch about 51% of cases. More than a quarter of cases were missed by both counts and never logged by the government, according to the report.

Concerted calls from campaigners and lawmakers for better official data on police killings emerged after a nationwide debate about race and policing was sparked by protests following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.