The PRIDE Act covers some of the same territory as the Death in Custody Reporting Act, an old law that fell off the books but was renewed in late 2014. The reason the PRIDE Act is still necessary is that its predecessor is widely considered ineffectual. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear that the PRIDE Act will solve its problems, as Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley who has long studied police use of force, told me.

The new bill and the old law share two salient features: They rely on states to provide the information needed, and they use federal grants as the mechanism for compliance. The way they handle the grants is a little different, though. The DCRA threatens to cut existing federal funding to states if they don’t report their numbers. Withholding federal grants, however, hasn’t always been a successful tool to make states comply with laws they don’t like. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which uses the same mechanism, has only enlisted 17 states. The PRIDE Act instead creates new grants, relying more on carrots than sticks to achieve its aims.

That seems to answer the concerns often raised by local law enforcement agencies. Last fall, James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, warned The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery that any proposal to gather data that didn’t provide money for its collection was dead on arrival. “Otherwise it’s an unfunded mandate,” he said. “About 80 percent of police departments have fewer than 10 officers. They don’t have huge data collecting operations. They don’t even have a single person in some of these departments who are dedicated to all the statistical work they have to do now.”

The PRIDE Act might solve that problem (though its cost to taxpayers is unclear), but Pasco’s qualms spotlight the other potential pitfall in the bill.

“The states employ less than 5 percent of the police officers and sheriffs that operate in the state. How are they going to get the information?” Zimring wondered.

It’s a real problem. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tallies more than 12,000 local police departments, and there are thousands of sheriffs, too. As Pasco noted, few of these departments have statistics sitting around, just waiting to be collected by the state. That means the states, in turn, also don’t have the statistics sitting around, just waiting for Congress to pass a law requiring them to send the data to Washington. From a legislative standpoint, it’s much easier to institute a mandate on the states than it is to design—and fund—a program that collects data from every local authority. But it also reduces the chances of harvesting reliable, comprehensive data.

This isn’t the first time that Congress has sought to scrutinize questionable practices in local policing. The last major national outcry over police brutality was in 1992, when riots broke out after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, which had been videotaped. Those riots produced a huge amount of media attention, and they also produced calls for reform.