Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorofChange.org, issued the following statement:
“We applaud the decision of Congress to re-authorize the “Death in Custody Reporting Act”, we expect President Obama to quickly sign this critical piece of legislation into law and we urge full and swift implementation of all its provisions by the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. In this historic time and nationwide focus on police accountability, we will continue to hold our national leaders accountable to producing and releasing to the public a complete and accurate account of those who have been killed by cops.
“In October, ColorOfChange.org launched @KilledByCops, www.killedbycops.org, tweeting out incidences of people killed by law enforcement in recent years and demanding a national database of all those who have been killed. More than 1 million ColorOfChange members and our allies have demanded that federal agencies address a nationwide trend of police violence with major reforms — including the collection and release of comprehensive data on how many people are killed by law enforcement officers each year.
“Police targeting of primarily Black and brown youth and adults has been elevated to the level of a national crisis. The government needs to step in and take the necessary leadership to make sure peoples’ rights and lives are protected in all encounters with police. And since fewer than 5% of law enforcement agencies in the country currently provide information on fatal shootings committed by officers, a comprehensive data collection of police homicides in the United States is desperately needed at this time.
“In addition to other federal policing reforms, the public has a right to know the scale of police killings nationally. This data will allow federal officials to identify patterns of misconduct, hold individual officers and departments accountable when necessary, address the policies that incentivize police brutality, and implement reforms that allow law enforcement to do its job while respecting the lives and dignity of all communities.
“We’ll continue to urge the Department of Justice to implement a comprehensive, streamlined, public national-level database of police shootings, excessive force, killings, misconduct complaints, traffic and pedestrian stops, and arrests, broken down by race and other demographic data, with key privacy protections, the exclusion of personally identifying factors and information, and deportation immunity for civilians.”
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With over 900,000 members, ColorOfChange.org is the nation’s largest online civil rights organization.
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Details on the bill: http://mic.com/articles/106392/congress-just-passed-a-bill-addressing-police-killings-while-no-one-was-looking
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1447