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FBI to sharply expand system for tracking fatal police shootings

 
Published Dec. 9, 2015

The FBI's system for tracking fatal police shootings is a "travesty" and the agency will replace it by 2017, dramatically expanding the information it gathers on violent police encounters in the United States, a senior FBI official said Tuesday.

The new effort will go beyond tracking fatal shootings and, for the first time, track any incident in which an officer causes serious injury or death to civilians, including through the use of stun guns, pepper spray, and even fists and feet.

"We are responding to a real human outcry," said Stephen L. Morris, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which oversees the data collection. "People want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using force. It always fell to the bottom before. It is now the highest priority."

The FBI's efforts follow a year of national focus on fatalities and injuries at the hands of police, with widespread frustration over the lack of reliable data on the incidents.

Morris said the data will also be "much more granular" than in the past and will probably include the gender and race of officers and suspects involved in these encounters, the level of threat or danger the officer faced, and the types of weapons wielded by either party.

The data also will be collected and shared with the public in "near real-time," as the incidents occur, Morris said.

David Klinger, a former police officer and professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, who has advocated for better data for more than a decade, said he was pleased to hear of the new system but skeptical about its implementation.

"The devil is in the details," Klinger said. "When agents of the state put bullets downrange in citizens, we need to know about that. In a representative democracy, we need to know about that. We are citizens, not subjects. We also need to understand the circumstances of the shootings, so we spot trends, so we can improve training."

Getting reliable data on fatal police encounters in the United States is notoriously difficult. The FBI has struggled to gather the most basic data, relying on local police departments to voluntarily share information about officer-involved shootings. Since 2011, less than 3 percent of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies have done so.