Why the FBI’s attempt to track police violence hasn’t worked

Nearly four years on, the FBI’s once-vaunted effort to track police violence appears to be floundering — hampered by an incomplete data collection method, a lack of police resources and a culture that doesn’t promote accountability.

And it’s not as if the numbers are negligible. Since 2015, the number of police shootings resulting in death is 8,166. That averages out to about 1,000 people a year, the Washington Post reported — making it clear that the federal government needs to make it a priority to keep track of when and where this happens, say experts.

Communities are speaking up as well. In the wake of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers, the Memphis City Council is calling for police reforms, one of which will include more transparency around use-of-force data, Reuters reported.

“The collection of data on use of force is not a luxury,” Alex Del Carmen, criminologist and associate dean at Tarleton State University said. “It’s a necessity.”

The FBI’s database is voluntary and many agencies don’t participate — making the data murky at best. It’s a huge void, say experts. An accurate database and the proper collection of data regarding police brutality is crucial and might help prevent further incidents in the future.

Most law enforcement entities recognize that data collection is important in understanding what their officers are doing and not doing, said Del Carmen. “You don’t have the ability of understanding that unless you collect the data.”

A vague definition of “use-of-force”

The database, National Use-of-Force Data Collection, got its start in 2019 when the FBI launched it as a way to record how frequently law enforcement/citizen interactions included “use-of-force” on the part of the police.

During an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in September 2016, James Comey, former FBI director, said that a database that tracked instances of police force would be released by 2017. The intent, he explained, would be to, as PBS described it, fix a record-keeping gap, which leads to uninformed conversations about police brutality. In July 2017 the FBI started a pilot program; in January 2019, the Use-of-Force Data Collection program launched nationwide.

But there were problems from the get-go. First, how “use of force” is defined. The FBI’s use of the phrase is broad and subject to ambiguity. It refers to any time a law enforcement officer does anything that results in death or serious injury.

It also includes anytime a law enforcement officer discharges a firearm either in the direction of a civilian or at a civilian. In the words of the FBI, use of force includes: “any action that resulted in the death or serious bodily injury of a person or the discharge of a firearm at or in the direction of a person.” And “bodily injury” in this case refers to an injury that results in “a substantial risk of death, unconsciousness, protracted and obvious disfigurement or protracted loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ or mental faculty.”

Freddy Martinez, senior researcher at the Project On Government Oversight, said the categories for use of force are vague. It can mean anything from using a baton to take someone down to shooting someone. As explained earlier, it can include anything that results in death or severe injury.

“You leave it to 40,000 police departments across the country to decide what that [use of deadly force] means,” Martinez said.

The three most common categories in the database for the “type of force use,” according to data from the FBI, are firearms, “hands-fists-feet” and tasers. To demonstrate just how ambiguous these terms are, Martinez mentioned a 2017 investigation on Chicago police departments released by the Justice Department. The investigation found, as he explained, that when police officers fired at fleeing suspects, they would not report these as uses of force or deadly force — because they missed.

A spokesperson for the FBI said in an email that the way recording works is with a web portal provided by the FBI “and bulk electronic submission options” for agencies to input information.

“So even the limited data that is available may be biased and untrustworthy,” Martinez said.

There’s a culture of “why is this important”

Del Carmen says that many police departments simply lack the resources needed to collect data on the use of force. He said that most police departments across the country are rural, which means they might have particularly limited staff and budgets. Add to that, they often just don’t think it’s necessary.

It’s a cultural thing in police departments to dismiss the importance of data collection, said Del Carmen They just don’t see data collection as “an essential tool in their management practices.” “It’s just not a “crucial component of law” in their minds.

Not everyone has to participate

The problem? It’s voluntary. The data is not the whole picture of how often people are getting killed by police. As of May 2022, the data only reflects only data on about 66 percent of sworn officers in the nation. To put that number into context, in 2022 only 8,482 out of 18,514 federal, state and local law enforcements agencies participated.

What’s more, as Richard Berk, professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania explained, with limited data, we do not know exactly how representative that percentage really is in a few ways, calling the data submitted “pretty thin.” For example, without complete data, the numbers that are available could be disproportionately urban or disproportionately rural.

The government has traditionally had a hands-off policy toward local law enforcement entities, Del Carmen said.

There are certain statutes that require agencies, like prisons, to report use-of-force data to the federal government, Martinez points out. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, for example, requires states receiving specific federal funding to report in-custody deaths to the Department of Justice. But there are issues with this too. According to September 2022 reporting from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 70 percent of submitted records were incomplete. More specifically, submissions were missing at least one required detail, such as a “description of the individual’s death.”

Ultimately, Martinez thinks that it’s really a question of political will more than anything: how hard is the Department of Justice (the FBI falls under the DOJ) willing to fight to get local agencies to comply with this kind of reporting?

One possible way to compel law enforcement agencies to comply with reporting? Through funding, says Jason Johnson president of the Legal Defense Fund.

Because many law enforcement agencies receive federal funding, Johnson said, they could make participating in this database a condition for receiving that funding. He added that the federal government can also provide grant funding to facilitate reporting if the issue is related to limited resources. “Frankly, I don’t think agencies are shying away from the information, I think it’s just burdensome to provide.”

He adds that a serious problem with the lack of data is that it makes it difficult to know if any sort of reform legislation would be appropriate or beneficial for law enforcement if there is no data on what the underlying issues are.

Is there a path forward?

Most experts seem to agree that we need to do a better job at collecting data and holding law enforcement agencies accountable — but how to go about it is still a question.

Del Carmen thinks that the conversation about police brutality, more generally, should start with the recruitment and hiring practices of police departments.

And, he added, the use-of-force data collection will plant the seed in the culture of law enforcement that somebody is watching, providing some sense of accountability.

Martinez says the next steps toward greater participation in this database are both stronger congressional oversight on the Department of Justice’s administration of the data and greater attention from the Department of Justice.

But he’s not sure if things will change so quickly. It’s true that there is a lot of talk about taking action, given how many recent police shootings there have been, but he says, the priorities of the public are not always the priorities of Washington.

“So there’s a lot of talk about taking action,” Martinez said, “with very little action being actually done.”

Thanks to Brett Zach for copy editing this article.