US Police Voluntary Homicide Reporting System Should Be Reformed - FBI

FBI Director James Comey said the FBI was working to improve the US police's voluntarily reporting on people shot by officers.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US police practice of voluntarily reporting cases in which officers kill citizens is a system that needs to change and one that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is trying to improve, FBI Director James Comey said in a US House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.

"[I]t is ridiculous that I can’t tell you with any confidence how many people were shot by the [US] police in any period of time, yesterday, last week, last year because we don’t have uniform reporting,” Comey said on Wednesday. “We have 17,000 police departments in the United States, they’re not all reporting to us violent encounters with suspects, and so I don’t have any confidence in my data.”

Earlier in March 2015, the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report that said the program recording the number of police deaths in the United States only captures half of police-caused homicides.

Additionally, the police program is voluntary, and a number of law enforcement agencies do not consistently submit death statistics or do not submit any at all.

Comey said that he was in the process of working with local sheriffs and police chiefs to try to improve the police homicide reporting system. Meanwhile, the FBI Director said the Bureau would also work with the US Congress to figure out incentives to give law enforcement officials to submit their agency’s homicide data.