Justice Department trials system to count killings by US law enforcement

The US government is trialling a new open-source system to count killings by police around the country, in the most comprehensive official effort so far to accurately record the number of deaths at the hands of American law enforcement.

The pilot program was announced by the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, on Monday and follows concerted calls from campaigners and lawmakers for better official data on police killings, after a nationwide debate about race and policing was sparked by protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

In anticipation of the launch, further details of the Department of Justice program were shared with the Guardian, which publishes The Counted, a crowdsourced investigative project that attempts to track all those killed by US law enforcement in 2015. The program is understood to be already active, with a view to full implementation at the start of 2016.

The new program will be run by the DoJ’s statistics division, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and is seen internally as a more robust version of the currently defunct Arrest Related Deaths Count, which published annual data between 2003 and 2009 using statistics supplied by some of the United States’ 18,000 law enforcement agencies. The BJS eventually stopped collecting this data in 2014 as the level of reporting varied dramatically from state to state, due to the voluntary nature of the program.

A separate system operated by the FBI counts and publishes an annual record of fatal shootings by police officers. It has been sharply criticised by critics of law enforcement, however, for releasing incomplete data that understates the total without making that clear.

The program, Lynch said on Monday, will start by procuring open-sourced records, such as media reports, of officer-involved deaths, and then move towards verifying facts about the incident by surveying local police departments, medical examiner’s offices and investigative offices.

This approach is near-identical to the one employed by The Counted. A BJS official told the Guardian that the methodology would essentially standardise data collection, meaning the DoJ would no longer have to rely on voluntary reporting by local law enforcement. It is understood that The Counted along with the Washington Post’s police shootings count are being monitored as part of the DoJ program.

“We’re going through this process of identifying [online] key words, key sources, we’re not just relying on law enforcement,” said the official.

“We think then we’ll have a more robust program to stand up in 2016 [and] we’re confident we’ll have the true number, or something close to the true number [of deaths].”

The official said the BJS would aim to establish reporting coordinators in each state – potentially based in the offices of state law enforcement – who would aim to contact local agencies on a quarterly basis for official records of deaths that were identified via open sourcing.

“It may take some time to get it out to all 50 states in 2016 but once we do that, we think we will have a standardised system in play,” the official said.

The Guardian understands the BJS will consider approaching a sample of law enforcement agencies where deaths have not been reported via open sourcing, in an attempt to make sure no death goes unrecorded. The BJS may also consider collecting data on severe use-of-force incidents in the future.

The method is a shrewd attempt to circumnavigate the legal landscape whereby law enforcement agencies are not required to submit data on killings by officers.

The FBI also collects data on what it calls “justifiable homicides” by officers, which is submitted on an entirely voluntary basis by police departments. In 2014, the FBI recorded 444 deaths; The Counted has so far documented 884 deaths in the first nine months of 2015.

A report issued by Justice Department officials in March said that an average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the government’s two official records every year for almost a decade.

The report estimated that there had been “an average of 928 law enforcement homicides per year”, indicating that the FBI’s published count of 414 such deaths in 2009, for example, underestimated the total by 124%.

Earlier that month, Barack Obama’s taskforce on policing issued recommendations for better data collection as part of a call for top-to-bottom criminal justice reform.

“There was a great emphasis on the need to collect more data,” Obama said after a meeting with the taskforce. “Right now, we do not have a good sense, and local communities do not have a good sense, of how frequently there may be interactions with police and community members that result in a death, result in a shooting.” As he prepared to leave his post as attorney general, Eric Holder called the government’s accounting for use of force “unacceptable”.

Lynch announced the new pilot program at a press conference on Monday in which she clarified statements she made last week about the data on fatal interactions between police and civilians.

Last week, Lynch told journalist Chuck Todd that the DoJ “is not trying to reach down from Washington and dictate to every local department how they should handle the minutiae of record-keeping”, in response to a question about the lack of a national system to track deaths by law enforcement. She said last week that the department “encouraged” record-keeping with regard to fatal police shootings but said improving the police-community relationship was more important.

“The statistics are important, but the real issues are: ‘what steps are we all taking to connect communities … with police and back with government?’” she said on Thursday.

She clarified her statements at Monday’s press conference, insisting that information on police shootings was “vital”.

“Let me be clear: police shootings are not minutiae at all and the department’s position and the administration’s position has consistently been that we need to have national, consistent data,” she said.

The FBI director, James Comey, called for additional data on fatal police shootings last week but announced no changes to the bureau’s existing voluntary reporting system, in which law enforcement may choose to report “justifiable homicides”.