Bernie Sanders calls for record-keeping of deaths in police custody

[Eric J in MN]

...along with other reforms such as body cameras and funding to improve policing standards.

People "must do more than just echo the phrase Black Lives Matter. We must put actions behind those words. Actions that will bring about the fundamental reform that is needed in the face of this crisis. Criminal justice reform must be the civil rights issue of the 21st century and the most first piece has to be police reform. The killings of African-Americans has got to stop.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/bernie-sanders-decries-shocking-mass-incarceration-statistics-at-racial-justice-forum/

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. Every use of violence between police and civilians should be tracked.

By the Justice department.

[sabrina 1]

2. Finally, someone has addressed this egregious practice after decades of nothing being done about it.

It should shock EVERY American that the police can sweep the deaths of US Citizens under the rug without even recording them. What have we come to?

I followed a blog for YEARS that was trying to keep a record of Police killings of US Citizens and never got over the sick feeling I got each time I read of yet another murder by cop.

Yet, I saw NOTHING being done about it. Dem/Repub admins have come and gone and NOTHING has been done, in fact it is worse now that it was. At least in the Rodney King case the Feds got involved and prosecuted the perps AFTER they got off initially.

When as the DOJ intervened SINCE THEN in cases, such as Michael Brown's murder?

I don't get it. Nearly 800 Americans have been killed by cops since Jan of this year alone and there is hardly a whimper from our 'ISIS/TERROR' Corp Media about this most serious issue.

Good for Bernie, he listens and then looks for solutions, but this is the first time I've seen a politician actually address this issue since I began to follow it seriously more than 15 years ago.

[aidbo]

3. This is something all Americans should get behind!

The Guardian has a site devoted to tracking police killings.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

From the 'about' page:

How does the US government count killings by police now?

The FBI runs a voluntary program through which law enforcement agencies may or may not choose to submit their annual count of “justifiable homicides”, which it defines as “the killing of a felon in the line of duty”.
This system is arguably less valuable than having no system at all: fluctuations in the number of agencies choosing to report figures, plus faulty reporting by agencies that do report, have resulted in partially informed news coverage pointing misleadingly to trends that may or may not exist.
Between 2005 and 2012 just 1,100 police departments – a fraction of America’s 18,000 police agencies – reported a “justifiable homicide” to the FBI.
The FBI system counted 461 justifiable homicides by law enforcement in 2013, the latest year for which data is available. Crowdsourced counts found almost 300 additional fatalities during that year. The Counted, upon its launch on June 1, 2015, had already found close to that number of killings in just the first five months of this year.

[LWolf]

4. Good. nt