For years, legislators, community leaders and others have wanted to know: How many black Americans have died while being apprehended, arrested or transported by law enforcement officers? And how does that number compare with the number of men and women of other races and ethnicities killed each year in police custody?
No one knows the official answers to those questions. It has been five years since Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013, which went into effect in December 2014, but federal officials have not yet gathered the data and made it public. Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott of Virginia introduced the legislation, created based on an earlier law that expired in 2006 and had required states to submit quarterly reports on deaths in police custody.
The new law requires the Attorney General to collect from each state as well as all federal law enforcement agencies “information regarding the death of any person who is detained, under arrest, or is in the process of being arrested, is en route to be incarcerated, or is incarcerated at a municipal or county jail, state prison, state-run boot camp prison, boot camp prison that is contracted out by the state, any state or local contract facility, or other local or state correctional facility (including any juvenile facility).”
Earlier this year, two members of Congress — the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler of New York, and the chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, Karen Bass of California — wrote a letter to the Inspector General requesting an investigation into the Department of Justice’s failure to implement the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013.
A 54-page report from the Office of the Inspector General chronicles problems the U.S. Department of Justice has had implementing the law. It notes that state-level data collection “will be delayed until at least FY 2020,” which ends Sept. 30, 2020.
The report, released in December 2018, also points out that the Department of Justice “does not have plans to submit a required report that details results of a study on DCRA [Death in Custody Reporting Act] data. DCRA required that such a report be submitted to Congress no later than 2 years after December 18, 2014.”
https://journalistsresource.org/stu...-justice/deaths-police-custody-united-states/