Government fails to release data on deaths in police custody
Source: Associated Press
Government fails to release data on deaths in police custody
By ROXANNE READY, HANNAH GASKILL and NORA ECKERT
June 19, 2019
More than four years after Congress required the Department of Justice to assemble information about those who die in police custody, the agency has yet to implement a system for collecting that data or release any new details of how and why people die under the watch of law enforcement.
The information vacuum is hampering efforts to identify patterns that might lead to policies to prevent deaths during police encounters, arrests and incarceration, say advocates and the congressman who sponsored the Death in Custody Reporting Act.
“The result of it is that people are not coming home,” said Jesselyn McCurdy, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “They’re not coming home because they’re dying.”
The law, enacted in December 2014, is meant to paint a clearer picture of police-involved killings and deaths inside correctional facilities. It requires both state and federal law enforcement agencies to report information about those who die while under arrest, in the process of being arrested or while incarcerated.
The measure passed amid public outrage over police killings including the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Now, a crisis of suicides in jails across the U.S. — prompted in part by the incarceration of the mentally ill — has raised interest in the law and its delayed implementation.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/de404fd6795d4a61bc72c7df188eb9cd
