article_snippet.sent: But the event raises broad, troubling questions about how often such incidents take place without the benefit of a third-party recording.
article_snippet.sent: It's not supposed to be a mystery: More than 20 years ago, Congress approved a law, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed by President Bill Clinton, that requires the federal Justice Department to collect data on deaths caused by police.
article_snippet.sent: a law, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed by President Bill Clinton, that requires the federal Justice Department to collect data on deaths caused by police has never truly been implemented, leaving us with patchy information about particular episodes rather than a comprehensive sense of how race and policing play out in America.
article_snippet.sent: I'm all for having police use body cameras, although police are not a magic cure for preventing or stopping the excessive use of force.
article_snippet.sent: But the much bigger problem is that we simply don't know when and where police killings take place, or whether police killings cluster in particular cities or states.
article_snippet.sent: whether unjustified or excessive force correlates with particular forms of officer training or detectable underlying racial bias.
article_snippet.sent: We don't even know the role played by officers operating under stressful conditions or while dealing with mental or physical illness.
article_snippet.sent: According to Section 210402 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, "The Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.
article_snippet.sent: By 2001, a New York Times article noted that when it comes to police uses of deadly force, "No comprehensive accounting for all of the Justice Department exists.
article_snippet.sent: The job is even harder because many police departments, reluctant to air many police departments dirty laundry, fail to distinguish between justified and unjustified killings on the reasonable grounds that it's up to the courts to rule on whether an officer has committed brutality -- something that's often established only after years of court proceedings.
article_snippet.sent: In 2011, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an extensive investigation of police killings in and around Las Vegas and found 378 shootings over a 20-year period, 142 of which were fatal.
article_snippet.sent: A group of activists has created a website called MappingPoliceViolence.org that flags cases of police killings; A group of activists estimate that at least 304 black people were killed by police in 2014 may stand as the best guess we have about the dimensions of a national problem.
article_snippet.sent: As the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorialized in 2011: "How many lives might be saved if taxpayers everywhere were better informed about police shootings?
article_snippet.sent: How can taxpayers everywhere were better informed about police shootings know about a potential local problem without information? ...
article_snippet.sent: Police already track everything from domestic violence to child abuse to murder, and police routinely lobby state and federal lawmakers to put new crimes into statute.
article_snippet.sent: That common-sense observation is being echoed by the Obama administration -- specifically, the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, created in December in response to widespread protests following the police killings of unarmed black men including Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
highlights_snippet.sent: Federal law on reporting of such shootings goes unenforced -- how many instances do we never hear about?