(Sept. 27, 2016) One of the Treatment Advocacy Center’s most consistent recommendations has been that the federal government must do a must better job to accurately count and report the number of fatal police encounters that occur nationally. It was a key recommendation of our December 2015 Overlooked in the Undercounted report, which also found that the risk of being killed during a police incident is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other civilians approached or stopped by officers.
Without such accurate and complete data, it is vastly more difficult to make effective policy decisions or to marshal support for needed reforms. As FBI Director James B. Comey remarked, “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by police last week, last month, last year.”
Major media organizations have joined the Treatment Advocacy Center in calling for better data collection and have stepped stepping in to help fill the data void. The Guardian tallied the number of people “killed by US law enforcement agencies since 2015” in its crowdsourced project, The Counted.The Washington Posttallied the number of people killed by US law enforcement agencies in 2015 and 2016, including an accounting for those involving mental illness.
The federal government is now working to increase transparency and improve accountability surrounding deaths related to the arrest process. In August, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would take steps to remedy this concern.
Explaining that “accurate and comprehensive accounting of deaths that occur during the process of arrest is critical for law enforcement agencies to demonstrate responsiveness to the citizens and communities they serve,” the DOJ will be updating the systems they rely on to collect information on deadly incidents involving law enforcement officers.
As detailed in the Federal Register in August, all 19,450 state and local law enforcement agencies and 685 medical examiner or coroner’s offices in the United States will be asked to respond to the DOJ on an annual basis to document all “arrest-related deaths.” These details, including whether the decedent exhibited mental health problems will provide more comprehensive data and allow policymakers to better make the case that law enforcement should not be forced onto the front lines of mental health treatment.
(Photo credit: steve lyon/Flickr Creative Commons)