Proposal is part of broad call for reform and comes as Justice Department prepares to issue its own findings that Ferguson police target African Americans

A taskforce convened by the president after the fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August recommended on Monday that local law enforcement agencies be required to report to the federal government when their officers kill someone, according to recommendations discussed by taskforce members in a conference call following a meeting with the president.

“There is a recognition that we need to collect this data. There’s absolutely no question about that,” said the taskforce co-chair Charles H Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner.

The recommendation was part of a broad call for criminal justice reform submitted by the Task Force on 21st Century Policing. President Obama has 30 days to direct the taskforce to do any final work before the panel is dissolved.



The president received the taskforce’s advice as his Justice Department prepared to issue its own report on Ferguson, which was expected to find that local police officers disproportionately targeted African Americans with traffic tickets, arrests and other fines, as a regular technique for balancing the city budget, according to advance reports.

The policing taskforce submitted its interim recommendations to Obama after only 90 days of work, which included six “listening hearings” across the country with researchers and with police and community leaders. Obama convened the panel after the deaths of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley in New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Brown in Ferguson and other civilians at the hands of police last fall gave rise to a national protest movement.

One prominent point of public frustration following high-profile killings of civilians by police has been the lack of an accurate national database of such deaths. “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police in this country last week, last year, the last decade – it’s ridiculous,” the FBI director, James Comey, said in a speech last month at Georgetown University.

It is not known how many killings by police officers go uncounted in the United States each year. Local law enforcement agencies are not required to participate in the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program, the source of one widely cited but debunked tally.

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The taskforce did not indicate, however, which agency – whether the FBI or a federal statistics agency – might be assigned to collect the data on killings by police, or under what authority the data would be collected. There is no federal law requiring local agencies to report data on officer-involved homicides, although some states require such reporting.

“There’s not really a mechanism specified in the report as to how that would happen,” said the task force co-chair Laurie Robinson, a professor at George Mason University and former justice department official.

The presidential taskforce also was expected to call on the White House to create a longer-term crime taskforce “to review and evaluate all components of the criminal justice system for the purpose of making recommendations to the country on comprehensive criminal justice reform”.

“The justice system alone cannot solve many of the underlying conditions that give rise to crime,” the draft report said.

The forthcoming Justice Department report on Ferguson police department tactics, which was first revealed by the New York Times, could lead to a civil rights lawsuit against the department or a settlement of some kind. The Justice Department is also weighing civil rights charges against the officer who killed Brown, Darren Wilson, although prosecutors have recommended against charges and the department was expected to follow suit.