In December 2019, a Wilkinsburg police officer fatally shot 24-year-old Romir Talley during what police said was an exchange of gunfire — an account disputed by his family.
A cop killing a Black man under questionable circumstances is precisely the kind of encounter that spurred the FBI earlier that year to ask law enforcement agencies across the nation for critical information on when they turn to deadly force.
Such details could finally put some hard numbers on undercounted and often violent encounters between police and citizens that have led to protests and movements that have changed the course of police relations in America.
But the Wilkinsburg killing — as well as other cases about citizens dying at the hands of police officers — are missing from the federal database
That’s because nearly two-thirds of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies are still not turning over details about violent encounters that national experts had hoped could lead to improved training and ultimately save lives.
Near the bottom of the list: Pennsylvania — where just 1% of police agencies have sent their use-of-force statistics to the FBI during the first three months of the year, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette analysis shows.
Despite support from the White House, top members of Congress, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the program’s lack of participation has created gaps in a system that was created during one of the most tumultuous periods in the nation’s history.
“Flat-out completely inexcusable,“ said longtime civil rights attorney Timothy P. O’Brien, who has practiced in local courts for more than four decades. “There’s no reasonable explanation for that kind of non-participation.”
Wilkinsburg Police Chief Ophelia Coleman said she was aware of the FBI’s database but claimed that she had not been “invited to participate.”
“Why would we be hiding anything?” she said.
However, a member of the FBI's policy board that advised the agency on the database said no formal request is necessary.
"It doesn’t require an invitation,” said William G. Brooks III, a Massachusetts police chief who also serves on the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
In a state with more than 1,500 total reporting jurisdictions, a paltry two dozen — including the city of Pittsburgh — were enrolled in the FBI’s program in the first quarter. Of those, 21 actually turned over their information.
Only Louisiana and West Virginia had worse rates in the U.S. as of March — and they boast far fewer police agencies than Pennsylvania, with its plethora of local governments.
Police shootings not disclosed
Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, has decades of experience when it comes to grappling with data shortcomings in policing.
He was on the front lines in 1996 when the ACLU sued Pittsburgh over civil rights violations including police brutality claims. The suit alleged a pattern and practice of excessive force that led to a consent decree with the Justice Department the following year — the first of its kind in the nation — and brought the police under federal oversight until 2005.
Mr. Walczak said he never forgot the hard lessons learned about what happens when a city doesn’t keep such details.
Pittsburgh police “were not tracking anything, and it allowed those police officers who chose to violate the rules to do so with impunity because they never got disciplined, nobody in the public knew who the bad officers were, [and] there was no accountability,” Mr. Walczak said.
While Pittsburgh is one of the commonwealth’s few law enforcement agencies that uploads monthly use-of-force reports to the FBI, the lack of involvement by the vast majority of agencies creates troubling echoes, said Mr. Walczak.
“The fact that Pennsylvania is well behind many other states is not a surprise, and it’s nothing to be proud of at a time when I think more and more people are looking at how policing works or doesn’t work in this country,” he said.
While criminologists have long sought robust data about police use of force, the issue became more urgent in the wake of high-profile killings of Black people by police officers. Counted among the victims: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York City — both in 2014 — and, most recently, George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Shaken by such fatal encounters and the civil unrest that sometimes exploded in their wake, then-FBI Director James Comey in 2015 bemoaned the federal government’s “incomplete” and “unreliable” information about officer shootings.
“How can we address concerns about ‘use of force,’ how can we address concerns about officer-involved shootings if we do not have a reliable grasp on the demographics and circumstances of those incidents?” Mr. Comey asked during a speech at Georgetown University.
“We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze data to see the true nature of what’s happening in all of our communities.”
That demand for a more complete picture set the groundwork for a push that would reverberate across the country. Its goal: to gather crucial details of police shootings that had never before been collected by the government.
Ultimately it evolved into the rollout of the FBI program.
Critical gaps in deadly force
The way it works is simple: The FBI asks police departments to submit monthly reports on whether their officers have killed anyone, caused serious injury or fired their guns, even if they didn’t hit anyone.
Police departments that have been ignoring the requests cite a range of reasons, including not enough time or manpower, concern the data might make them look bad, and fear that the federal government will usurp their authority and force changes on them.
Had the Penn Hills Police Department sent data when the federal program began, it would have told the FBI about a July 2019 incident in which one of its officers killed a 20-year-old man wanted for questioning in a homicide.
Penn Hills police Chief Howard Burton cited limited staffing as something hampering him from supplying the data. He also alluded to a general unease that police forces have about the federal government.
“That puts you in a corner. We gave you all this data, and now you’re saying we have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do the other thing, and we can’t afford it,” Chief Burton said.
Defense lawyer Paul Jubas, who is representing Mr. Talley’s mother in a lawsuit against Wilkinsburg and two police officers in federal court, said he is riled by the slim numbers of police agencies taking part in the voluntary system.
“This is about accountability,” Mr. Jubas said. “The idea that these police departments aren’t engaging in this, it’s not surprising because they generally try to reduce transparency.”
Whatever the reason for not participating, Mr. Comey’s fears six years ago about critical gaps remain as acute as ever.
In 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to track excessive force cases across the country and said that some grants should be withheld from those jurisdictions that refuse to take part.
Today, the most comprehensive tracking of deaths at the hands of police officers is done not by the FBI, but by the Washington Post and grassroots activist groups such as Mapping Police Violence.
“We have more data than the federal government has on this issue,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a California-based policy analyst and data scientist who helped create Mapping Police Violence.
That data relies on various sources, including local media reports, social media, state use-of-force databases, such as those in California and Texas, obituaries and crowdsourcing.
‘National embarrassment’
Right now, 29 states have fewer than half their police departments sending data to the FBI.
That’s nowhere near enough, according to some experts.
Justin Nix, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska, said he was frustrated that the system is still voluntary.
“We’re living in a democracy and to not know how often agents of the government put their hands on people, shoot at people or tase people is unacceptable,” Mr. Nix said.
Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, has called that lack of information a “national embarrassment.”
He noted that the government gives law enforcement agencies millions of dollars a year absent any requirement to supply use-of-force data.
“I just don’t understand it,” said Mr. Alpert, who testified at a policing task force under President Barack Obama.
Mr. O’Brien, the civil rights lawyer, was the lead counsel on the lawsuit with the ACLU that led to the consent decree with Pittsburgh. He thinks he knows why police departments don’t participate.
“What they don’t want is people poking around in their business,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Not so, some departments claim.
Police officials interviewed for this story touted the importance of transparency — even if they don’t give the FBI their data. They believe that their officers rarely use the kind of force that turns into the kind of data the government is gathering, especially when compared to the total number of encounters they have with citizens.
Kenneth Truver runs the Castle Shannon Police Department, one of the only agencies in Allegheny County that sends use-of-force reports to the FBI.
As a member of the executive board of various police associations, Chief Truver keeps abreast of initiatives like the FBI’s and the recommendations of police professional associations that support the data collection.
“I think that sometimes the perception is that the police are involved in more use-of-force incidents than they really are,” Chief Truver said. “When we inform the public, then they don’t fill in the gaps on their own with information that is erroneous.”
■ Participating■ ■ Enrolled, but no data submitted
Jason Haberman, the deputy police chief in Mt. Lebanon, next to Castle Shannon, called the FBI’s database “much-needed” and “long overdue.”
But his department has yet to send any information, including a July incident when two of his officers exchanged gunfire with a man who killed his parents and then himself.
Philadelphia shootings not reported
In Pennsylvania, data from the two biggest police forces is absent.
The Philadelphia Police Department, with the largest number of personnel in the state — 6,300 sworn officers — also has one of the highest numbers of officer-involved fatal shootings in the commonwealth over the past three years, according to the Washington Post database.
Another large department — one with even more deaths at the hands of officers — is the Pennsylvania State Police, the state’s second-largest force. It doesn’t participate either.
“There’s no excuse for the City of Philadelphia; there’s no excuse for the Pennsylvania State Police. They know better. They have the information. They know the information can be used to properly monitor the police,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Philadelphia police did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
State police acknowledge that they’ve had three years to funnel information to the FBI and have not done so.
But with a massive computer update currently underway, officials say that will soon change.
Because the agency is already the clearinghouse for crime statistics for some 1,700-odd police departments in the commonwealth, it is well positioned to start collecting use-of-force data.
The plan is to allow agencies to forward their information on a voluntary basis. But starting in 2023, any department that doesn’t send its information to the state police will risk punishment.
Scofflaws will become ineligible for certain small grants from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, and the municipalities they serve might have to forfeit revenue from court fees, state police said.
“We’re not going to mandate this right out of the gate, but we will mandate this a year down the road,” said state police Maj. Patrick D. Brinkley, director of the Bureau of Research and Development.
Police fear federal takeover
The carrot-and-stick approach on the state level mirrors one that has been advocated — but not enacted — nationally.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police has pushed for tying participation in the database to getting federal funds, which can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One prominent supporter of withholding the money is Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who supported a package of reforms known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House of Representatives in March but died in the Senate due to partisan bickering.
“We cannot accept a system — informed by centuries-old prejudices and racial bias — that turns a blind eye to the injustice and systemic racism impacting our communities of color,” the lawmaker said in a statement to the Post-Gazette.
“The fact that so few police departments are even willing to share use-of-force data with the FBI’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection program is further proof that we need to pass substantial reform at the federal level.”
As part of that reform, the act would have required police to report their data to the state attorney general’s office.
Democrats in Pennsylvania had tried a similar approach last year as part of a package of reform bills introduced after a white East Pittsburgh police officer fatally shot Antwon Rose II, an unarmed Black teenager in 2018.
The officer was acquitted, sparking massive protests. But efforts to build a use-of-force database failed.
The state Senate Democrats blamed the Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing officers, for torpedoing the reforms.
“We still had to deal with a very strong lobby group in the form of the FOP, and they were only willing to go so far,” a staff member said.
Jonathan D. Silver: jsilver@post-gazette.com. Joel Jacobs: jjacobs@post-gazette.com.
First Published: November 7, 2021, 10:45 a.m.
Updated: November 7, 2021, 1:14 p.m.
