The attorney general says local police are encouraged to maintain records on such killings, but improving police-community relations is more important

Attorney general Loretta Lynch says the federal government should not require police to report fatal shootings of civilians, sharply diverging from her predecessor Eric Holder’s stance on police killings.

In a conversation with NBC journalist Chuck Todd on a range of criminal justice issues, Lynch said on Thursday that she does not support a federal mandate to report people killed by police.

“One of the things we are focusing on at the Department of Justice is not trying to reach down from Washington and dictate to every local department how they should handle the minutia of record keeping, but we are stressing to them that these records must be kept,” she said at the Washington Ideas Forum, hosted by AtlanticLIVE and the Aspen Institute.

Lynch said the Justice Department does “encourage” local departments to maintain records on police shootings but that improving police-community relations is more important. She noted that the small size of the average police department could make record-keeping difficult.

“The statistics are important, but the real issues are: ‘what steps are we all taking to connect communities … with police and back with government?’” she said.

Todd pressed Lynch to comment on the lack of data, citing The Counted, the Guardian’s project to track all deaths by police in 2015, as the best source for fatal interactions with police.

“I’m not going to comment on news organizations keeping numbers,” Lynch said in response. “I think they do a pretty good job sometimes.”

Lynch’s statements show a sharp contrast from her predecessor’s position on tracking police violence. Holder, the former attorney general who left office in April, has called the lack of official data “unacceptable”. Before leaving office he called its collection the “first step” toward improving police-community relations.

“I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policymakers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police. I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders – including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police – who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities,” Holder said in January. “Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: We need to do both.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice told the Guardian in a statement Friday that Lynch encouraged police to maintain records regarding police-civilian interactions. The spokesperson, Melanie Newman, also noted that the department requires such record-keeping when it enters into consent decrees with local agencies.

“Her broader point was that while maintaining data to record police interactions is important, we should be focused on preventing those interactions by improving relationships between local law enforcement and their communities,” Newman said.

In the wake of high-profile police killings of unarmed black men, many looked for data on how many people police kill each year only to find that was no reliable number. Police departments may voluntarily submit information on “justifiable homicides” to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which counted 444 of these deaths in 2014. Director James Comey resisted calls for a mandatory reporting system this week, calling for more data on fatal police shootings but maintaining the voluntary reporting system.

“I don’t have the power to require people to supply us with data,” Comey said at a roundtable with reporters on Thursday.

The Guardian has launched a project, The Counted, to track all people killed by police in 2015. As of Friday afternoon, 878 have been killed by law enforcement.