[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 147 (Thursday, December 4, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6341-S6343]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEATH IN CUSTODY REPORTING ACT
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I have long worked to pass legislation to
bring additional transparency and accountability to the government. I
do so again today by calling on all Senators to support the Death in
Custody Reporting Act, a bill that has moved multiple times through the
Senate Judiciary Committee and should pass the Senate without further
delay.
This is about an open and fair government. The Death in Custody
Reporting Act requires that local and Federal law enforcement officials
report deaths that occur while people are held in their custody,
including those that occur during arrest. Nothing more. Just yesterday
the Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of police-related deaths
are unaccounted for in Federal statistics. I ask that the article,
``Hundreds of Police Killings Are
[[Page S6342]]
Uncounted in Federal Stats,'' be made part of the Record. The details
of the article are unacceptable. The Justice Department should have an
opportunity to analyze the data and see what we can learn from it. And
the American people deserve the same.
This important opportunity for needed transparency comes at a time
when many Americans are losing faith in our justice system. We are
having an important conversation about the loss of human life in
communities across the country. Here we have an opportunity to instill
some measure of accountability, and hopefully begin to restore some
measure of trust in these communities.
This legislation, sponsored by Congressman Bobby Scott,
overwhelmingly passed the House last year in a bipartisan vote. We
reported the bill out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a similarly
strong bipartisan vote, with Ranking Member Grassley speaking in strong
support of the legislation. Currently, every single Senate Democrat is
in support of its passage, but a handful of Senate Republicans are not
yet convinced. It is my hope that they soon reconsider, and we can send
this legislation to the President for signature without delay. The
American people would expect as much.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Wall Street Journal, Dec. 3, 2014]
Hundreds of Police Killings Are Uncounted in Federal Stats
FBI Data Differs from Local Counts on Justifiable Homicides
(By Rob Barry and Coulter Jones)
Washington--When 24-year-old Albert Jermaine Payton wielded
a knife in front of the police in this city's southeast
corner, officers opened fire and killed him.
Yet according to national statistics intended to track
police killings, Mr. Payton's death in August 2012 never
happened. It is one of hundreds of homicides by law-
enforcement agencies between 2007 and 2012 that aren't
included in records kept by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105
of the country's largest police agencies found more than 550
police killings during those years were missing from the
national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to
the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to
determine how many people are killed by the police each year.
Public demands for transparency on such killings have
increased since the August shooting death of 18-year-old
Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo. The Ferguson Police
Department has reported to the FBI one justifiable homicide
by police between 1976 and 2012.
Law-enforcement experts long have lamented the lack of
information about killings by police. ``When cops are killed,
there is a very careful account and there's a national
database,'' said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia
University. ``Why not the other side of the ledger?''
Police can use data about killings to improve tactics,
particularly when dealing with people who are mentally ill,
said Paco Balderrama, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City
Police Department. ``It's great to recognize that, because 30
years ago we used to not do that. We used to just show up and
handle the situation.''
Three sources of information about deaths caused by
police--the FBI numbers, figures from the Centers for Disease
Control and data at the Bureau of Justice Statistics--differ
from one another widely in any given year or state, according
to a 2012 report by David Klinger, a criminologist with the
University of Missouri-St. Louis and a onetime police
officer.
To analyze the accuracy of the FBI data, the Journal
requested internal records on killings by officers from the
nation's 110 largest police departments. One-hundred-five of
them provided figures.
Those internal figures show at least 1,800 police killings
in those 105 departments between 2007 and 2012, about 45%
more than the FBI's tally for justifiable homicides in those
departments' jurisdictions, which was 1,242, according to the
Journal's analysis. Nearly all police killings are deemed by
the departments or other authorities to be justifiable.
The full national scope of the underreporting can't be
quantified. In the period analyzed by the Journal, 753 police
entities reported about 2,400 killings by police. The large
majority of the nation's roughly 18,000 law-enforcement
agencies didn't report any. ``Does the FBI know every agency
in the U.S. that could report but has chosen not to? The
answer is no,'' said Alexia Cooper, a statistician with the
Bureau of Justice Statistics who studies the FBI's data.
``What we know is that some places have chosen not to report
these, for whatever reason.''
FBI spokesman Stephen G. Fischer said the agency uses
``established statistical methodologies and norms'' when
reviewing data submitted by agencies. FBI staffers check the
information, then ask agencies ``to correct or verify
questionable data,'' he said.
The reports to the FBI are part of its uniform crime
reporting program. Local law-enforcement agencies aren't
required to participate. Some localities turn over crime
statistics, but not detailed records describing each
homicide, which is the only way particular kinds of killings,
including those by police, are tracked by the FBI. The
records, which are supposed to document every homicide, are
sent from local police agencies to state reporting bodies,
which forward the data to the FBI.
The Journal's analysis identified several holes in the FBI
data.
Justifiable police homicides from 35 of the 105 large
agencies contacted by the Journal didn't appear in the FBI
records at all. Some agencies said they didn't view
justifiable homicides by law-enforcement officers as events
that should be reported. The Fairfax County Police Department
in Virginia, for example, said it didn't consider such cases
to be an ``actual offense,'' and thus doesn't report them to
the FBI.
For 28 of the remaining 70 agencies, the FBI was missing
records of police killings in at least one year. Two
departments said their officers didn't kill anyone during the
period analyzed by the Journal.
About a dozen agencies said their police-homicides tallies
didn't match the FBI's because of a quirk in the reporting
requirements: Incidents are supposed to be reported by the
jurisdiction where the event occurred, even if the officer
involved was from elsewhere. For example, the California
Highway Patrol said there were 16 instances in which one of
its officers killed someone in a city or other local
jurisdiction responsible for reporting the death to the FBI.
In some instances reviewed by the Journal, an agency believed
its officers' justifiable homicides had been reported by
other departments, but they hadn't.
Also missing from the FBI data are killings involving
federal officers.
Police in Washington, D.C., didn't report to the FBI
details about any homicides for an entire decade beginning
with 1998--the year the Washington Post found the city had
one of the highest rates of officer-involved killings in the
country. In 2011, the agency reported five killings by
police. In 2012, the year Mr. Payton was killed, there are
again no records on homicides from the agency.
D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she
doesn't know why the agency stopped reporting the numbers in
1998. ``I wasn't the chief and had no role in decision
making'' back then, said Ms. Lanier, who was a captain at the
time. When she took over in 2007, she said, reporting the
statistics ``was a nightmare and a very tedious process.''
Ms. Lanier said her agency resumed its reports in 2009. In
2012, the agency turned over the detailed homicide records,
she said, but the data had an error in it and was rejected by
the FBI. She referred questions about why the department
stopped reporting homicides in 1998 to former Chief Charles
H. Ramsey, now head of the Philadelphia Police Department.
Mr. Ramsey declined to comment.
In recent years, police departments have tried to rely more
on statistics to develop better tactics. ``You want to get
the data right,'' said Mike McCabe, the undersheriff of the
Oakland County Sheriff's Office in Michigan. It is ``really
important in terms of how you deploy your resources.''
A total of 100 agencies provided the Journal with numbers
of people killed by police each year from 2007 through 2012;
five more provided statistics for some years. Several,
including the police departments in New York City, Los
Angeles, Philadelphia and Austin, Texas, post detailed use-
of-force reports online.
Five of the 110 agencies the Journal contacted, including
the Michigan State Police, didn't provide internal figures. A
spokeswoman for the Michigan State Police said the agency had
records of police shootings, but ``not in tally form.''
Big increases in the numbers of officer-involved killings
can be a red flag about problems inside a police department,
said Mike White, a criminologist at Arizona State University.
``Sometimes that can be tied to poor leadership and problems
with accountability,'' he said.
The FBI has almost no records of police shootings from
departments in three of the most populous states in the
country--Florida, New York and Illinois.
In Florida, available reports from the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement don't conform to FBI requirements and
haven't been included in the national tally since 1996. A
spokeswoman for the state agency said in an email that
Florida was ``unable'' to meet the FBI's reporting
requirements because its tracking software was outdated.
New York revamped its reporting system in 2002 and 2006,
but isn't able to track information about justifiable police
homicides, said a spokeswoman for the New York State Division
of Criminal Justice Services. She said the agency was
``looking to modify our technology so we can reflect these
numbers.''
In 1987, a commission created by then- Governor Mario Cuomo
to investigate abuse of force by police found that New York's
reports to the FBI were ``inadequate and incomplete,'' and
urged reforms to ``hold government accountable for the use of
force.'' The spokeswoman for the state criminal-justice
agency said it isn't clear what the agency did in response
back then.
Illinois only began reporting crime statistics to the FBI
in 2010 and hasn't phased in
[[Page S6343]]
the detailed homicide reports. ``We cannot begin adding
additional pieces because we are newcomers to the federal
program,'' said Tern Hickman, director of the Illinois State
Police's crime-reporting program. Two agencies in Illinois
deliver data to the FBI: Chicago and Rockford.
In Washington, D.C., councilman Tommy Wells held two
hearings this fall on police oversight. He said he was
surprised that the department hadn't reported details of
police killings to the FBI. ``That should not be a
challenge,'' he said.
More than two years after the knife-carrying Mr. Payton was
shot and killed by D.C. police, his mother, who witnessed the
killing, said she is still looking for answers. Helena
Payton, 59, said her son had many interactions with local
police because of what she said was his mental illness. ``All
the cops in the Seventh District knew him, just about,'' she
said.
The officers who arrived that Friday afternoon in August,
in response to a call from Mr. Payton's girlfriend, had never
dealt with her son, she said. According to Ms. Payton, her
son walked outside holding a small utility knife. As he
approached the officers, they fired dozens of bullets at him,
she said. He died soon after.
The U.S. attorney's office is reviewing the incident, as is
customary in all police shootings in Washington. A spokesman
for the office declined to comment on the status of the case.
The Washington police department, citing the continuing
investigation, declined to provide the officers' names, a
narrative of what happened, or basic information usually
included in the reports to the FBI, such as the number of
officers involved in the shooting.
The officers involved are back on duty, according to D.C.
authorities, but the case isn't closed.
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