Why we still don’t know how often police kill people in America

ONE: GET POLICE DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO report when their officers use lethal force or seriously injure someone. Two: Collect that information in a national database. Three: Release those statistics to the public.

That simple formula has been at the heart of nearly every comprehensive police-reform proposal in modern U.S. history. And for good reason: police chiefs and community organizers, Republicans and Democrats, federal lawmakers and local leaders all agree that a comprehensive database of use-of-force incidents is key to fighting racial injustice in law enforcement. But that bipartisan agreement, as well as a 26-year-old federal law mandating the creation of a database and a five-year effort by the FBI to build one, have all failed to produce reliable data on how and when America’s police officers use force against its own