[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

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     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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