WaPo | THE LEADERS of a protest movement against excessive police force are weighing their next steps, The Post’s Wesley Lowery reported this week.
The assessment follows both greater success than anticipated in
triggering rallies across the nation and some backlash that blamed the
protests (baselessly, in our view) for last weekend’s slayings of two New York City police officers .
As
the leaders consider their next moves, we hope they do not lose sight
of an early achievement, which will require attention to bring it to
fruition. One test of any social movement is its power to inspire
legislation. By that measure, the protests that followed the deaths of
Michael Brown and Eric Garner already demonstrated strength. Before
adjourning, Congress adopted and sent to President Obama a significant
bill that could help provide a crucial missing ingredient for reform:
accurate information.
The Death in Custody Reporting Act would give state and local law enforcement agencies incentives to report to the Justice Department
all deaths of people, for any cause, while they are under arrest, in
the process of being arrested, detained or incarcerated. Agencies that
want to retain federal funding would have to fill out a brief form for
each case, including the name, age, gender and race of the deceased,
along with a short explanation of the circumstances. While the statute
would cover nonviolent deaths, and even deaths from illness, as well as
violent ones, the main hope is that it will enable data-crunchers to
analyze patterns in the use of force and thereby spot potentially
unjustifiable trends at particular departments.
To
be sure, the measure is not exactly brand-new. A version passed in 2000
but expired in 2006; in only three of those years did the Justice
Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics have authority to require quarterly reports — a requirement with which compliance was less than total. Since then, voluntary reporting has continued but also has proven spotty. A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that
nearly 45 percent of the justifiable homicides tallied by the nation’s
105 largest police departments went unreported to the FBI between 2007
and 2012. Florida and New York, two of the largest states in the
country, accounted for 290 of 580 missing cases analyzed by the paper.
