The FBI plans to start keeping count in 2016 of the number of civilians either seriously hurt or killed by police, as independent tallies put this year’s number of fatal officer-involved shootings at close to 1,000.
Officials announced on Tuesday this week that the FBI will officially begin keeping track of not only deadly altercations involving America’s policemen, but also incidents in which civilians are seriously injured during altercations with law enforcement that may involve weapons other than firearms, including stun guns or pepper spray.
“We are responding to a real human outcry,” Stephen L. Morris, the assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told The Washington Post this week. “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.”
Although local law enforcement agencies have been encouraged to voluntarily share information involving their own officer-involved shootings, The Post concluded that less than 3 percent of the country’s 18,000 state and local police agencies have done so since 2011.
Stephen Fischer, a senior official in the FBI’s criminal justice information services division in West Virginia, told The Guardian that the program will address “a need for more robust and complete information about encounters between law enforcement officers and citizens that result in a use of force.”
“I am anxious to see what the the FBI releases,” added Brittany Packnett, a member of a task force on 21st-century policing assembled last December by President Obama. “Frankly, I’m glad to see the FBI and another branch of the federal government catching up to what the people have been demanding for a long time.”
Indeed, the FBI said this week that it plans on collecting more than just rudimentary information as well. Mr. Morris, of the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services, told The Post that the data will be “much more granular” than the details logged up until now, and will likely make note of the gender and race of officers and suspects involved, as well as the perceived threat faced by the cops and any weapons at play.
The bureau hopes to begin logging the data in 2016 and said it will share it in real-time.
More than 900 civilians were fatally shot by police so far this year, according to The Post’s own analysis, while the Guardian has put the tally at 1,058 deaths.
Annually, the FBI has reported an average of around 400 fatal officer-involved shootings per year.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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