PITTSBURGH — A national effort to gather information about police shootings and other violent confrontations with law enforcement in America is at risk of shutting down because of poor participation, including a lack of involvement from police in Pennsylvania.
The program, led by the FBI, started to collect data on use-of-force encounters in 2019 — including cases that led to high-profile shooting deaths — but a report from the Government Accountability Office this week warned the voluntary effort could be shuttered if more departments do not take part.
The report noted the special program was supposed to pull in numbers representing 60% of law enforcement officers to reach certain standards by the end of 2022, the GAO said. At the end of September, the numbers had reached about 54%.
“The FBI faces risks that it may not meet the participation thresholds,” said the GAO, “and therefore may never publish use of force incident data.”
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation last month found that Pennsylvania was near the bottom of the list for agencies taking part — just 1% sent their use-of-force statistics to the FBI during the first three months of the year.
Only Louisiana and West Virginia had worse rates as of March — and they boast far fewer police agencies than Pennsylvania, with an abundance of local governments.
The federal effort was considered particularly critical since no official nationwide database exists for use of force incidents. To fill in gaps, media outlets like The Washington Post and activist groups created their own systems for tracking violent or deadly encounters.
The lack of data on use of force has been particularly glaring in the wake of high-profile police killings of Black people in recent years, such as the murder of George Floyd last year that triggered massive protests in cities across the country against racial injustice and police brutality.
When the program was unveiled two years ago, experts said they had hoped the data would help lead to improved training, and ultimately, protect lives.
Despite the push to create the first government database of its kind, police agencies nationwide and especially in Pennsylvania have been hesitant to hand over data to the FBI, citing limited staffing and unease around sharing the information with the federal government.
Pittsburgh is among those that take part in the program, but other large agencies such as the Philadelphia Police and Pennsylvania State Police do not.
Only 21 Pennsylvania agencies submitted data through the first quarter of 2021, the Post-Gazette reported. Since the newspaper’s investigation, the FBI has published more recent figures, but Pennsylvania’s participation has hardly budged — only two more agencies submitted data through September of this year.
Locally, the killing of unarmed Black teenager Antwon Rose II in 2018 by a white East Pittsburgh police officer triggered protests and charges against the officer, who was ultimately acquitted.
Democrats in Pennsylvania proposed creating a statewide use-of-force database last year, but those efforts so far have failed.
Controversial police shootings continue in the state, including an incident last December when Christian Hall, a 19-year-old Chinese American teenager, was shot and killed by state troopers in northeastern Pennsylvania. Hall was standing on an overpass, experiencing a mental health crisis and holding a realistic-looking pellet gun.
Last month, video acquired by Spotlight PA and NBC News showed that Hall was shot with his hands in the air while holding the pellet gun, contradicting initial state police reports that said he was pointing the gun at officers.
The beginnings of the database can be traced to former FBI Director James Comey, who bemoaned the federal government’s “incomplete” and “unreliable” information about officer shootings during a speech in 2015.
“We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze data to see the true nature of what’s happening in all of our communities,” Mr. Comey said during an address at Georgetown University.
That demand for a more complete picture triggered a push that would reverberate across the country. Its goal: to gather crucial details of police shootings that had never before been collected by the government.
Ultimately it evolved into the rollout of the FBI program.
Despite support from the White House, top members of Congress, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the program’s lack of participation has created gaps that experts say must be filled for the database to be complete.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police has pressed for linking participation in the database to getting federal funds, which can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for agencies.
One key supporter of withholding the money is Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who supported a litany of reforms known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House of Representatives in March but died in the Senate due to partisan bickering.
“The fact that so few police departments are even willing to share use-of-force data with the FBI’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection program is further proof that we need to pass substantial reform at the federal level,” the senator said in a statement to the Post-Gazette last month.
