FIRST REGULAR SESSION
House Concurrent Resolution No. 22
97TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY
INTRODUCED BY REPRESENTATIVE ROORDA.
WHEREAS, a feature distinguishing police from all other groups in society is their authority to apply lethal force when circumstances call for it; and
WHEREAS, police may be called on to use force when making an arrest, breaking up an altercation, dispersing an unruly crowd, or performing a myriad of other official activities during their daily routines; and
WHEREAS, the force may range from relatively minor physical contact to get a person's attention, such as pushing or a firm grip on an arm, to deadly force by use of a firearm; and
WHEREAS, despite the protests and controversy they provoke, there is no comprehensive data on police shootings across the country; and
WHEREAS, while the FBI collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force; and
WHEREAS, no agency or organization comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty - the taking of a life by use of a firearm; and
WHEREAS, agencies and organizations from the United States Justice Department to the International Association of Police Chiefs to local and state police agencies have guidelines and policies on use of force, but seldom is that use of force quantified and analyzed for trends; and
WHEREAS, the only standardized national database on police shootings is the FBI's Uniform Crime Statistics Justifiable Homicide table, which is based on voluntary reporting by police departments and does not include police shootings ruled unjustified or "bad shoots"; and
WHEREAS, despite widespread public interest and a provision in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 requiring the United States Attorney General to collect data on police shootings and to publish an annual report from the data, statistics on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal because the 17,000 individual police departments are not required to report any data collected; and
WHEREAS, while the United States Department of Justice has issued several reports regarding the use of police force, including the 1996 national Data Collection of Police Use of Force and the 1999 Use of Force by Police Overview of National and Local Data, no national database has been established in the nearly twenty years since the enactment of federal laws on the collection and reporting of data regarding police shootings; and
WHEREAS, in 1999, the United States Justice Department promised to follow through on a Congressional mandate requiring the FBI to collect data on police shootings, but without a mandate for a national database on police shootings and mandatory reporting by every police department, no comprehensive statistics can be compiled; and
WHEREAS, in January 2012, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that between 2006 and 2010, St. Louis Metropolitan police fired their weapons far more frequently, per 1,000 crimes, than officers in 16 other big cities. Since "there is no national database on police shootings, [there is] no way to measure conclusively the indicators that officers in [St. Louis] fire their weapons more often than cops in other cities. A national database, correlated with data on criminal populations, would be immensely useful."; and
WHEREAS, on December 8, 2012, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran an editorial praising a new program by the University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger that will track and analyze St. Louis police-involved shootings. This new program follows a study Klinger authored on the same topic finding that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had improved the way it investigates police shootings, but that "there is significant room for more improvement, particularly in the area of public accountability"; and
WHEREAS, the absence of a reporting mandate for police shootings and a national database creates an appearance of protecting police from scrutiny; and
WHEREAS, while comprehensive data each year about police officers who were killed and assaulted in the line of duty is collected, a greater effort needs to be made to collect data on how often and the circumstances in which police use force and violence against American citizens to obtain a more accurate measure of the relationship between police and the communities they serve; and
WHEREAS, unless data on the police officers killed and assaulted in the line of duty as well as the data on police shootings are collected and maintained in a national database, the net result may be a system that highlights citizen violation against police officers while failing to take into account the effect of police shootings of our citizens:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the members of the House of Representatives of the Ninety-seventh General Assembly, First Regular Session, the Senate concurring therein, hereby strongly urge the United States Congress to establish a national database on police shootings and require police shooting data to be submitted by every police department in the United States; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Chief Clerk of the Missouri House of Representatives be instructed to prepare a properly inscribed copy of this resolution for each member of the Missouri Congressional delegation.
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