“The US Department of Justice, for the first time, will keep a comprehensive database of fatal officer-involved incidents, amid rising skepticism around police accountability.

It seems impossible to ignore that the announcement from the Federal Register came late on Monday, just one day before the two-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown — the unarmed black teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His death triggered protests, sparked a national conversation about policing, and shone a spotlight on the systemic racism that pervades criminal justice in the US.

Until now, the FBI has maintained a dataset which includes information about fatal police shootings. Local law-enforcement agencies can voluntarily submit homicide statistics, including incidents involving police, to state police departments, which in turn send the data to the FBI. But since Brown’s death, that system has been widely discredited.”