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    Raineyb1013Jay Connor
    12/01/18 1:44pm

    Without mandatory participation what good exactly will this database be? The police apologists will use the incompleteness of the data to do exactly nothing about the problem.

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      Bourbon_motorcycles_dont_mixRaineyb1013
      12/01/18 2:46pm

      I imagine you will be able to search the database by city so you should be able to find out if your local pd is participating. It might make protests more efficient knowing exactly who is and who isn't on your side.

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      sTalkinggoat, first and last of his nameRaineyb1013
      12/01/18 5:01pm

      If the fed is relying on departments to report their own user of force statistics they can make this database say anything they want. 

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    WrongPasswordJay Connor
    12/01/18 5:29pm

    But if the police have nothing to hide, then why isn’t the provision of data of said encounters not mandatory?

    Jurisdiction? AFAIK FBI (or federal authority in general) doesn’t have legal authority to force local police to do diddly squat?

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      BadOmbreWrongPassword
      12/01/18 7:26pm

      Exactly.  With a lot of things in federalism, there is no direct control of policing of local jurisdictions from the federal level.  Police forces are creatures of their respective states.  The way the Feds apply pressure is only through grants and such which many departments rely on for part of their revenue.

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      MisterPigginsWrongPassword
      12/01/18 11:06pm

      Sounds like it needs changing. Otherwise this database is entirely worthless, of not misleading and harmful.

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    FlamingFeministaJay Connor
    12/01/18 12:20pm

    Finally! Except no one had the balls to make participation mandatory or at least require it for federal funding...

    Wouldn’t it be great if a coalition of groups like NAACP, BLM, LaRaza, JDL, etc. formed some campaign in each state for enshrinement in state constitutions or local charters?

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      MalcireFlamingFeminista
      12/02/18 9:58am

      They don’t have the ability to make participation mandatory. The state governments would have to do that. The federal government could quite possibly make a number of grants contingent on participation though.

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      FormedrasMalcire
      12/02/18 6:03pm

      Hence “...or at least require it for federal funding...”

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    heninthefoxhouseJay Connor
    12/01/18 2:09pm

    This story is a page straight out of the playbook for government calming outrage about police killings and then doing nothing to follow through. Our country has seen public outrage against police violence against people of color for a hundred years—longer even. The Kerner Commission called for collection of this data in response to the 1967 race riots in places like Watts and Chicago.

    After the 1992 Rodney King riots, the government passed a law to collect data regarding police violence. It was called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The law said that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.”

    New York City exploded in 1999 when Amadou Diallo was shot and killed by four City of New York Police Department plain-clothed officers. They fired 41 shots, 19 of which killed Diallo. You may have heard the Bruce Springsteen song. Again, riots and the promise of action by Congress, which passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000. That law again required the Justice Department to collect information about officer-involved deaths. Mainstream media parroted the numbers released by DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics annually, saying between 297 and 386 people were killed by law enforcement--a vast undercount. DiCRA expired in 2006.

    And then came the killing of Michael Brown in August 2014, and in December, the Death in Custody Reporting Act was reauthorized. Again, the federal government promised to collect the data, but again made it a voluntary program. In October 2015, the Bureau of Justice Statistics did an analysis of their data collection and said they were only documenting about 50 percent of officer-involved deaths.

    In October 2016, the Washington Post wrote, “Justice Department to start collecting data on police use of force (again)” and the Guardian wrote “FBI to begin collecting self-reported data on fatal police encounters in 2017” both claiming victory due to their own efforts collecting data.

    And here we are again. Demonstrations against police violence in Birmingham, Alabama, over the death of EJ Bradford. Officers indicted in Texas and Tennessee. Time to pat the public on the head and tell us everything is going to be all right. But again, as you pointed out: “The FBI’s national database, however, will have limitations—as police departments are not required to report these encounters to the national database.” Seems a little hard to believe that individual agencies will suddenly support honesty and transparency.

     

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      Sassinak11heninthefoxhouse
      12/02/18 11:47am

      It’s honest and transparency so long as it supports the belief they want to project. When that runs contrary, then its “must protect the officer’s constitutional rights” (my support of which begins and ends when they are allowed to carry a gun and fire at will. If you are allowed to kill/maim a civilian, you don’t have any right to privacy.. you give that up to become and instrument of justice... don’t like it, then don’t become a civil servant/cop.)

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      Elizabethheninthefoxhouse
      12/02/18 11:47am

      Thank you for this solid synopsis.

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    ThirdAmendmentManJay Connor
    12/01/18 2:53pm

    Of course what the DoJ fails to mention is that the Trump Administration will be congratulating police departments based on the number of persons of color that are shot. 

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      Sassinak11ThirdAmendmentMan
      12/02/18 11:43am

      I hear its how they are giving out bonuses and purple hearts.

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    we just keep drivingJay Connor
    12/01/18 5:06pm

    NJ.com just released a searchable database of ALL uses of force by police so you can see each town and which officers (including full name) are using force more often than others. It was fascinating to see where and how force is used by town/city and how better tracking can help remove/retrain officers (not that I am optimistic that will happen) who are in need. Equally fascinating is how hard it was to compile the data. Here is their summary:

    “A 16-month investigation into New Jersey’s broken system for tracking and stopping overly aggressive police officers before they cause unnecessary injuries and costly lawsuits. NJ Advance Media reporters filed 506 public records requests and collected 72,607 use-of-force forms covering 2012 through 2016, the most recent full year available.”

    https://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2018/11/see_how_often_nj_police_punch_kick_or_use_other_fo.html

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    Rob X. RoyJay Connor
    12/01/18 1:51pm

    The UK only has a half dozen police departments. The US has over 18,000. Study criminal justice and they’ll claim modern policing began with Sir Robert Peele’s London Bobbies in the early 1800s. However, this is historical revisionism. On a sheer bureaucratic and operational level, it is obvious that US police forces are descendants of slave patrols.

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      BadOmbreRob X. Roy
      12/01/18 7:22pm

      Huh? There are at least 45 territorial police agencies in the UK and various other national and micellaneous forces. Still much fewer (and very likely much fewer per capita), but I have no idea where you are getting that there are only a half-dozen police agencies in the UK.

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      Constant ColorsRob X. Roy
      12/02/18 2:41am

      Between what BadOmbre said, the fact that the US is ~40x larger than the entire island which comprises the UK, and the fact that the ~18k figure includes campus police, sheriffs, local police and federal police forces it’s not really that surprising of a difference. There are ~5300 colleges in the US, that’s almost a third of that 18k figure before we even get into city police forces etc.

      We have a lot of problem police officers and a system which encourages them. It doesn’t help the situation to throw around bad correlations. 

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    eastcoastelite1Jay Connor
    12/01/18 3:34pm

    Of course this gets rolled out as soon as Jeff Sessions exits.

    I suspect we’ll see tougher enforcement of this (making participation mandatory or incentivizing it), but this is a good first step. 

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      Sassinak11eastcoastelite1
      12/02/18 11:48am

      I think you forgot to add the sarcasm tag to that comment.

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    MisterPigginsJay Connor
    12/01/18 10:55pm

    Voluntary reporting makes it worthless. If there isn’t mandatory reporting with punishments, then they’ll just lie like they do now.

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    Shivaya NamahJay Connor
    12/03/18 8:44am

    Except the last time they tried that, the fucking thing was a front and actually monitoring and categorizing black people who suspected of being radical or militant for non existant groups and threats.

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