Democratic members of Senate and House cite Guardian database as ‘wind at our back’ after months of stalled efforts to hold law enforcement accountable

Washington lawmakers have credited a Guardian investigation to count killings by police with building momentum on long-stalled law-enforcement reform and renewed efforts to force the US government to establish a comprehensive database of officers’ lethal use of force.

As members of Congress sought to turn a patchwork of proposals into a progressive agenda for action, authors of Democratic proposals in both the Senate and House to demand an official US record of police-involved fatalities said the journalistic project had been valuable in filling a void of governmental accountability – and in advancing new legislation.

“Let me just say on the record: the job you are doing here to point out the discrepancy in the numbers that are being reported is the wind at our back,” Senator Barbara Boxer of California said in an interview.

“These statistics in the Guardian’s study will be most helpful in making the case,” said Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

US senators call for mandatory reporting of police killings Read more

Boxer’s Police Reporting of Information, Data and Evidence (Pride) Act, which she wrote with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, was introduced earlier this week, one day after the launch of The Counted, the Guardian’s reported and crowd-sourced project to collect data on every killing by law enforcement in 2015.

The federal government does not currently keep a comprehensive record of people killed by police forces. Instead the FBI runs a voluntary program to submit numbers of “justifiable homicides”. The Guardian investigation found people were being killed by officers at twice the rate cited by the much-criticised FBI system.

The Boxer-Booker plan would require mandatory reporting on a series of data also being collected by the Guardian database, including the age, gender and race of anyone killed.

Precise locations of fatal incidents would also be collected. The Guardian on Monday began publishing the most comprehensive map of police killings ever produced, based on logged street addresses of incidents.

The issue of federal record keeping was brought to the fore following the fatal shooting last August of an unarmed 18-year-old, Michael Brown, by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s death led to widespread protest and unrest throughout the US, with protesters, activists and the teenager’s family calling for a so-called “Mike Brown’s law” that would mandate all police wear body cameras.

Various members of Congress have introduced a patchwork of progressive reforms that have been held up in the Republican-dominated House and Senate. Barack Obama subsequently introduced a small set of reform and funding initiatives based on executive actions, including prohibiting the sale of certain military equipment to police forces; those measures were dismissed by some experts as a “publicity stunt”.

Obama ban on police military gear falls short as critics say it's a 'publicity stunt' Read more

The call for mandatory reporting of officer-involved shootings was, however, backed by Eric Holder, who was until recently the US attorney general. “We lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents,” Holder said in January before stepping down. “Fixing this is an idea that we should all be able to unite behind.”

Boxer said she would strive to pass the mandatory-reporting proposal through the Senate despite likely opposition from the Republican majority.

“But if we don’t have somebody helping to prove that this is needed, this bill won’t go anywhere,” she said. “So it’s very, very helpful, and the more of this type of reporting, the better.”

Cohen’s proposed National Statistics on Deadly Force Transparency Act in the House of Representatives would further demand that any police homicides are “investigated and, if need be, prosecuted, by an independent actor” to avoid the frequent conflicts of interest seen in past inquiries around the US.

Amid suggestions from opponents that state authorities could simply decline to cooperate with such a plan or declare it unconstitutional, Cohen suggested that the Justice Department should deny federal funding to any department refusing to comply.

“We can tie reportage to financial outlays and financial outlays generally make police do things,” Cohen said in one of two interviews with the Guardian this week, before and after the Guardian published its ongoing database.

Boxer said such demands on officers would not be included in her plan and that increased federal funding would be provided to help cash-strapped authorities to comply.

Democratic congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a co-sponsor of Cohen’s legislation, described The Counted as “absolutely critical to the effort that is underway to address police violence in America”.

“It has often been said that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and this study will help shine an intense spotlight on the mess that exists with respect to police violence in America. Ultimately it will give us the opportunity to work to clean it up,” Jeffries said in an interview.

The congressman represents New York’s eighth congressional district, where unarmed black 28 year-old Akai Gurley was shot dead by an NYPD officer in November 2014.

“All too often individuals who have died as a result of a police shooting incident, or other form of activity, generate an initial public response that then wades into the background over time,” Jeffries said.

“But by collecting and aggregating this information nationally, it will provide all of us with the opportunity and with the courage to confront the issue head-on.”

Cohen suggested he had seen little indication that the legislation would pass the House, which is controlled by an overwhelming Republican majority.

“I have no confidence in anything in this Congress passing, but fortunately the bill of rights is not up for a vote,” Cohen said.

The Guardian’s analysis also found that at least 27% of people killed during encounters with police so far in 2015 were identified by family members, friends or police as having a mental health disorder.

In separate legislation introduced this week, Representative Gwen Moore, a Democrat from Wisconsin, introduced an amendment to mental illness legislation that would provide additional funding for state and local law enforcements to establish training programs for officers confronting mentally ill people.

The goal, Moore said in an interview, was for officers “to at least have some clues about how to approach people with mental illness, and that they be treated as mentally ill people rather than criminals”.

Representative Emanuel Cleaver said he thought the Guardian’s accountability project “helps in legislative decision-making” and “helps in determining policy”, despite Republican stalling on body-camera legislation and other police reforms he had proposed.

“I am now optimistic that Congress is – or at least the House will do something monumental on the issue of judicial reform that would also include issues relating to police,” he told the Guardian in an interview this week.

Cleaver and a group of determined lawmakers, including Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, have been meeting to push policing reforms since the beginning of the year. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has called for “every department” in America to require body cameras.

Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino and Tom McCarthy