House Resolution 1447, also known as the Death in Custody Reporting Act, passed through its final hurdle in Congress and will soon head to the President’s desk to be signed into law.??The measure, first introduced by Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA) in April of 2013, and co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI), passed the Senate on a Unanimous Consent vote on December 10th. Last year,?the House passed the?legislation?by unanimous voice vote.
The bill?requires states to report to the Attorney General all deaths in police custody, including any?person who dies in the process of being arrested, being transported to jail, or while being?held in detention. In addition, police will also be required to release the name, gender, race, ethnicity, and age of the individual, as well as the specific circumstances surrounding the person’s death.
A similar bill was put in place in 2000, but that program expired in 2006. Many police agencies still?report their numbers to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. However, the new version of the Death in Custody Reporting Act empowers?the Attorney General to withhold federal law?enforcement funding from departments that do not comply with the reporting requirements.
The measure was first introduced in April of 2013, but?although it passed the House last December, it did not reach the Senate floor until last week. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) ?pushed the bill to the Senate floor where it was approved unanimously.
In the wake of the controversial deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the new legislation will give the Justice Department more complete information about deaths in police custody. A recent ProPublica study estimates that, based on current data, African-American teenage males are more than 20 times as likely to be killed by police officers than their white peers. The new law will make it easier to obtain accurate statistics about police homicides (and other deaths in police custody). Not one member of Congress stood in opposition to this sensible piece of legislation.
Keith Brekhus is a longtime political activist who currently resides in Red Lodge, Montana. He has a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He was a Green Party candidate for Congress in 2002. His most recent political job was working as a Field Organizer in Arizona’s White Mountains, in support of Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick’s successful 2014 re-election campaign.
