Coalition calls on Loretta Lynch to implement 2014 law that allows for reductions of 10% on federal grant program if police don’t report deaths in custody

Dozens of civil rights, criminal justice and open government organizations have urged the US attorney general to withhold federal funding from local police chiefs unless they report comprehensive data on people killed by their officers.

Citing the findings of a Guardian investigation, the coalition of 67 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said police ought to be punished financially if they do not submit information to a new government program to count deaths in custody.



The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive Read more

“There should be simple procedures so that police can provide complete and accurate data or face clear consequences for non-compliance,” Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement.



Loretta Lynch is empowered by a 2014 law to impose reductions of 10% on the funding given by the justice department to police chiefs under a $280m-a-year federal grant program if their departments do not report deaths in custody. The law has, however, been largely ignored since being enacted.



The coalition of organizations wrote to Lynch this week with their submission to a consultation process opened last month by the Obama administration on plans for a new justice department program to record all deaths in custody.

The system, in which officials will contact departments to confirm deaths seen in media reports, mirrors The Counted, an ongoing Guardian effort to document all deaths caused by law enforcement in 2015 and 2016.



The new government program is intended to improve on a discredited voluntary system run by the FBI, from which police were allowed to opt out. The FBI’s annual count of “justifiable homicides” has recorded only about half the true number of deaths in recent years.



In their letter to Lynch, however, the campaign groups said the new government program did not go far enough to ensure comprehensive data collection.

Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the planned setup indicated that the justice department “would rather bend over backwards to accommodate police departments’ dysfunction or reluctance” than establish a compulsory system.



The groups said the government had shown a “disturbing reliance” on data collected by the Guardian and the Washington Post, which runs a count of fatal shootings by police.

“It’s the government that should be providing journalists with transparent data, not the other way around,” said Henderson, expressing concern that the new system would continue to place the onus on media to accurately report killings by police rather than the police themselves.



“Certain media outlets have been critical to understanding police-civilian encounters over the past year, but it is unlikely that national media attention and resources can remain on policing indefinitely,” the letter said.



The government’s announcement last month did indicate that officials would not depend entirely on open source information such as media reports. It said all 19,450 law enforcement agencies will be sent a form by the BJS each quarter requiring information on all the department’s arrest-related deaths.

Deaths that were already noticed in media reports would be listed by the BJS for confirmation or correction by the local departments, according to the plan. But space will also be included for the department to list additional deaths that were not previously noticed. Departments that have seen no arrest-related deaths that quarter will be asked to return “an affirmative zero” saying so.

Nonetheless, according to the coalition’s submission to the consultation this week, the justice department must use its power to penalize police departments financially if they do not comply with requests for information.



“It will be difficult for DOJ to get an accurate picture of trends in custodial deaths if state and local law enforcement agencies are not held accountable for collecting data after a death occurs,” the letter said. It added: “The financial penalty is critical to successful implementation of [the 2014 law] as voluntary reporting programs on police-community encounters have failed.”