Justice Department Announces Plan to Track Police Killings Across US

The Department of Justice announced plans to create a national database to track police use of force and police killings of civilians on Thursday. This decision comes more than two years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the incident that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and drew attention to the issue.

The move comes, in part, from President Obama's "Task Force on 21st Century Policing," which called for police to "collect, maintain and report data . . . on all officer involved shootings, whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death."

Until now, there has been no official nationwide effort to monitor the rates of police violence and killings in the United States.

"Accurate and comprehensive data on the use of force by law enforcement is essential to an informed and productive discussion about community-police relations," said Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a press release.

"The initiatives we are announcing today are vital efforts toward increasing transparency and building trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve," she continued. "In the days ahead, the Department of Justice will continue to work alongside our local, state, tribal and federal partners to ensure that we put in place a system to collect data that is comprehensive, useful and responsive to the needs of the communities we serve."

One of the biggest struggles in creating such a database is bound to be the localized nature of law enforcement, which gives a lot of administrative duties and day-to-day decision-making power to individual departments.

Prior to the Justice Department's announcement, some news outlets have tried to provide as much data as they could on national police violence. By tracking local reports of police killings around the country, the Guardian, for instance, has found 847 incidents of civilians dying at the hands of cops in this year alone, in its database called "The Counted."

Photo credit: Ciar [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons