On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order calling for, among other things, the establishment of a database on police use of force. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans included a similar provision in their own reform bill. But the FBI already has such a database — and so far a majority of police are not participating in it.
The FBI launched that program, the National Use-of-Force Data Collection project, last year. Now, with another wave of protests against police brutality gripping the country, many police agencies have not responded to the voluntary call for information about their officers — only 40 percent submitted their data for 2019, the FBI said. And the database has yet to be published. The first report is planned for this summer.
In his executive order on police reform issued Tuesday, President Trump called for “a database to coordinate the sharing of information” among law enforcement agencies on “instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters,” and said the attorney general “shall regularly and periodically make available to the public aggregated and anonymized data from the database.” It was not immediately clear if the FBI’s use-of-force project will be the vehicle for that order. Continue reading.