Police departments should be forced to report all deaths involving police officers to the federal government, Bernie Sanders said on Wednesday.

Asked by the Guardian whether he thought police departments should be mandated to report all officer-involved deaths, the leftwing Democratic presidential candidate said he would also support legislation to that end.

Young black men killed by US police at highest rate in year of 1,134 deaths Read more

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s rephrase it. You made a judgment: ‘They kill.’ When individuals die under police apprehension or police custody, should that be mandatory? Yes.”

“We need to require police departments and states to collect data on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody and make that data public,” Sanders states on his website.

The federal government does not currently publish a comprehensive record of people killed by American police officers.



Instead, the FBI has for several years released an annual count of “justifiable homicides” that were reported to the bureau voluntarily by regional agencies.

Last year, the Guardian began publishing The Counted, a project to count every fatality caused by police officers. It found that people were being killed by officers at more than 2.5 times the rate suggested by the beleaguered FBI system. The investigation has continued into 2016.



Toward the end of 2015, the FBI said it would overhaul its system to record more data on fatal and violent incidents. The FBI program will, however, remain voluntary and FBI officials will have no ability to compel departments to report deaths.

Separately, the Justice Department’s bureau of justice statistics (BJS) has revived a program to count all “arrest-related deaths” that was closed down in early 2014 amid concerns that too many deaths were being missed by officials.

A team testing a new incarnation of this program is monitoring public information sources, such as the Guardian’s database and local media reports, and then contacting regional authorities such as police departments and coroners to verify each case for inclusion.

Michael Planty, chief of victimization statistics at the BJS, said that if the full program resumes, provisional numbers of deaths caused by police could be published online as often as quarterly.

Planty said police departments were being cooperative with the pilot program but that some anxiety had been detected. “Given the high profile of some of the cases, people are concerned not with giving the information, but with how the information will be used,” he said.

Names of the people killed and other identifiers would not be published by the BJS program, according to Planty, who said the agency was barred from releasing personal information.

Planty said officials from the FBI and the BJS, who previously worked on their counts separately despite both being divisions of the Justice Department, were now cooperating to improve government counting efforts. “We have not previously had a coordinated effort like this,” he said.

It remains possible, however, that one of the government counting programs will be scrapped and all efforts directed to the other.

After spending several months scouring public sources for fatal incidents involving police, staff working for the BJS pilot program have moved on to the second phase of the pilot, in which regional authorities are contacted for verification.

“We’re about halfway through,” said Duren Banks, the lead statistician on the project, which is being run by private contractors. “We’ve gotten some good participation from a decent number of agencies.” A report on the program’s performance is scheduled to be delivered to the Justice Department in the spring.

The system has been identifying cases that potentially merit inclusion in the count at a rate of about 135 a month, according to officials, but this is likely to drop as more details are confirmed and duplicate cases are discounted.

Hillary Clinton’s plan for criminal justice reform states that she will work on improving relations between police and communities by “collecting and reporting national data on policing” including on shootings by officers and deaths in custody.

The Democratic frontrunner’s policy platform stops short of requiring reporting of all deaths, however, meaning that her pledge is arguably already being met by the federal government’s current patchy record-keeping program.

Last June, Democratic senators Barbara Boxer of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey proposed legislation mandating all police departments to report the same range of data as the Guardian’s project for an annual report by the US attorney general.

A similar bill was introduced in the House of Representatives in September by Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat. Both Democratic proposals are currently sitting with Republican-controlled congressional committees and are highly unlikely to proceed. No candidate remaining in the race for the Republican presidential nomination has made proposals on the collection of data on lethal force by police.

At the Columbia press conference, Sanders was praised by state representative Joe Neal as someone who has “been on the forefront of the issue” of poverty.

His colleague Justin Bamberg added: “For those of you who may not know, I want to let you know that poverty sucks.” He reminded members of the media that “as we sit in here protected from the weather”, the rain falling outside “also falls in many classrooms in the United States”.

Bamberg, best known as the lawyer who defended police shooting victim Walter Scott, is a particularly important advocate for Sanders, who has struggled to win over voters of color in the state, which votes for its Democratic nominee on Saturday. Hillary Clinton held a press event in Columbia on Tuesday with the mothers of several police shooting victims.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders said he would support legislation requiring police departments to report to the federal government any and all officer-involved deaths. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

Sanders pointed out that the US, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, had nearly the highest poverty rate, with almost 15% of the population, and 26% of the African American community, living in poverty.

And he attacked Clinton for her position on her husband’s “so-called welfare reform bill” of 1996, saying that since the legislation was signed into law, the number of those living in poverty had doubled, and the number of poor children, in particular, had skyrocketed.

The act required recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits, and placed a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds, among other provisions.

Sanders defended himself against the accusation that he was “blowing off South Carolina”, noting that there were almost a dozen states with Democratic contests coming up on 1 March.

Asked about what it meant that he was not doing as well as Barack Obama was at this point in 2008, he said, “It’s a sign that Obama ran an unprecedented and brilliant campaign in 2008,” adding: “Maybe we can’t run as extraordinary a campaign, but we’re doing very well.”

He added: “What I would ask of the media is not to look at it state by state. We’re going to have good days and we’re going to have bad days.”



Sanders on police killings

The Guardian: “Senator Sanders, you’ve said that investigations of police killings should be handed over to the Justice Department, and they’ve begun a pilot program where they can track officer-involved deaths, something previously only being done by media outlets like the Guardian. But such information remains voluntary. Do you think police departments should be mandated …”



Sanders [interrupts]: “Yes!”

The Guardian: “… to report to the federal government when they kill Americans and would you support pending legislation to force them to do so?”



Sanders: “Yes. Let’s rephrase it. You made a judgment: ‘They kill.’ When individuals die under police apprehension or police custody should that be mandatory? Yes.”