Thousands Of Police Dept. Don't Report Hate Data To FBI

 

The following is by the editorial board of The Washington Post:

The FBI released what seemed to be good news earlier this month, announcing that the agency had counted 7,262 instances of hate crimes in 2021 — a drop from 8,263 the year before. In fact, outside experts said, hate crimes might actually have trended sharply higher last year; the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism charted a 21 percent surge in hate crimes in 20 states over the same period. One reason for the discrepancy: The FBI relies on state and local police departments to report crime numbers to the federal government, and only 11,883 of 18,812 law enforcement agencies submitted their 2021 hate-crimes data. The nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, were among the non-reporters.

FBI crime data is supposed to give the public, criminal justice researchers and law enforcement agents hard numbers so that they have more than just instinct and anecdote — and the claims of demagogic politicians — to characterize what is happening on the country’s streets and elsewhere. Real numbers provide insights into what is working and what is not. They also show how often police respond to crime with force, against what types of people and in what situations. But voluntary compliance from state and local departments falls well short of what is necessary.

This is not the first time the FBI has struggled to collect reliable criminal justice statistics. The Post has tracked fatal police shootings since 2015, painstakingly sorting through news and social media reports, local law enforcement records and other sources. The Post has found that police shoot and kill about 1,000 people every year — including 1,084 over the past 12 months. Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans, the victims skew young, and nearly all are male. Further, the number of fatal police shootings has been rising in recent years, The Post’s tally shows. Yet the FBI has reported a decline between 2015 and 2021. The FBI’s records contain only about one-third of the 7,000 fatal police shootings The Post counted during that period.

In other words, the statistics provided voluntarily by local law enforcement agencies underplay both the scale of the problem and the urgency of taking measures to address it — for instance, by updating use-of-force guidelines and investing in de-escalation training. The FBI has embarked on a broad effort to track fatalities and serious bodily injury committed by law enforcement officers, plus instances in which police officers fire their weapons. Yet the bureau  almost had to shut down the program for lack of response from local police departments.

All of this is despite Congress having passed laws in 1994 and 2014 to improve federal crime data collection.

True, in any given year, smaller police departments might have seen no hate crimes, police use-of-force incidents or other notable events to report, so they might not see a need to inform the FBI. Doing so takes time and resources; the FBI estimates it consumes 38 minutes to report every incident to its police use-of-force database. Police departments complain that the FBI’s transition to a new crime reporting system, which asks for more details, has made complying harder.

But “none this year” results are crucial if the FBI is to compile an accurate and comprehensive report. Police departments that have a sense of what is happening within their areas would also benefit from seeing what is happening down the road — or across the country.

Congress should intervene once again. Federal appropriations to help police departments report their crime numbers are an obvious place to start. At the same time, Congress should condition the large number of various crime-fighting grants it sends to state and local governments on departments reporting their numbers. Bills such as 2021’s George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, which passed the House but got nowhere in the Senate, would have created such a system. Federal legislators should also eliminate any confusing or duplicative reporting requirements that place an unnecessary burden on police departments.

Ultimately, however, the federal government has only so much leverage. Most police funding comes from state and local governments. Some departments get scant federal money at all. So state governments should also step in, requiring their police departments to submit crime data to the FBI — or to them directly, to be forwarded to the FBI.

A trustworthy set of statistics is a foundational tool with which to begin figuring out just how big of a problem crime, police use of force and related issues are in the United States — and how to tackle them.