How is this accomplished? How is anything even close to this accomplished? What technology are you aware of that I'm not?

If only this were true.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/accidental-shooting/

When murder is outlawed, only outlaws will be murderers!

Seams like a lot of money for someone who broke his own neck.

City to pay Freddie Gray's family $6.4 million to settle civil claims

Loretta Lynch opposes mandatory collection of data about police shootings, other violence against civilians:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...ice?channel=us

Apparently, she thinks that instead of wasting valuable time reporting every time police shoot a civilian, police departments should focus on community outreach efforts. IMO, she either hasn't considered how the lack of this data serves to increase community suspicion towards cops, or she knows/strongly suspects that the data would look really bad.

"It would require a lot of manpower to record police involved shootings" is a curious argument for how keeping such records shouldn't be a priority.

How many shootings are these small PDs involved in? Don't they all have to write reports when using their guns? Maybe just put a photocopy in a file(ing cabinet) then count the copies every month? Shouldn't take more than like half an hour to count then recount with a third to check.

Really small PDs should be able to get away with this with just a show of hands end of the month.

(I'm aware the stats should be more detailed, but anything bests nothing ffs, how is this even a question? Real countries I can look up the exact count of shootings!)

Maybe setting the bar at shootings is a little high for these fragile PDs? They could report the tazing and choking deaths and graduate to shootings.

Seems reasonable.

Maybe just start with animals they have killed, then the statistics can escalate in violence up to killing innocent people.

Sure, except for the part where it's really hard to study whether certain techniques are effectively reducing the number of civilian "interractions" (cool euphamism, Loretta), if you don't have any data on how many "interractions" are occurring.

Like, if you actually wanted to reduce officer involved shootings, wouldn't it be nice if you could pull long term stats on officer shootings, identify areas where the number of shootings had declined over time, and then investigate what changes the departments made that had led to those changes? Wouldn't you like to have hard data to see if, for example, departments where officers carry tazers have fewer lethal shootings? If new training protocols or rules of engagement are introduced, don't we want data to test if those protocols work?

I agree that the ultimate goal should be to reduce shootings and not just data collection. But the data collection is an important part of both figuring out HOW to reduce shooting and knowing whether our efforts are working. Without data, you're just flying blind.

I agree with you that it would be nice if all PD would keep detailed stats, but the Federal Government, and especially the AG, have limited power to make it happen. I think LL is right to weigh the feasibility of the Federal Government attempting to force it. I also think requiring it at a condition of consent decrees is a sensible way to go about making sure the worst offenders are having data recorded on them.

The FBI has 35,000 employees spread across the country and an 8b dollar budget. Can't they keep track of this stuff on their own?

How are they to get the data is the PD themselves don't keep stats? Do what the press has resorted to for shootings and just scour the newspapers?

Have a guy in the field office ask his contacts if they had an officer involved shooting this month. Forward data to DC. Should not be hard.

Lol if serious

Even for lou this is a bizarre bit of kneejerk liberal-opposition. Remarkably stupid, again, even for lou.

If the FBI is asking "his contacts" to report police shootings, how is that any different than the policy he opposes?

Of course, what he actually wants is police to be able to kill blacks with impunity.

just get the police to fill out a simple "I fired my gun today" form whenever they fire their gun. It could have a few simple yes/no answers to questions like "did anyone die?"

It is how the bls gets their data this really isn't hard.

Lol SL. Is the fbi asking all the cops individually? If not how is this not just having the PD keep records?

You don't have to ask every cop ffs. Someone has to fill out some paperwork, right? If you can't make the individual departments fill it out do it yourself FBI.

I'm confused as to why it might ever be possible for a police department to not know how many times one of their officers has shot a member of the public. Hopefully I'm misunderstanding!

I can imagine the process Phil imagines is neccessary. Every cop after every shift sends in a piece of paper to Loretta stating that they did or did not kill anyone today at work.

It is ridiculous to think that this is not the simplest of data collection tasks.

I thought officers already had to write a report every time they discharged their weapons?