James Comey Promises FBI Database to Track Race-Based Police Activity

Never let a serious crisis go to waste, goes the old axiom. And in the context of America’s ongoing tension regarding race and policing, it would appear that the crisis has provided a ripe opportunity to further centralize policing in the United States by mining data from state and local law enforcement agencies.

At a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey promised a panel of senators that he would spend the remaining seven years of his 10-year term to build a national database to monitor the role of race in use of force by police across the country.

“We simply must collect data that is reliable nationwide about police use of deadly force in altercations, encounters, with civilians,” Comey said, in an exchange with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., (F, 11%). “If there is anything more inherently governmental than that, I can’t imagine what it is.”

During the hearing, Comey said that the need for the database is due to the fact that the only available information that the public has about policing incidents and the use of force comes from newspapers, whose “data isn’t comprehensive”:

“We will build a nationwide database that the FBI will collect that shows us what happened, when, who was involved, what were they like, what were the circumstances so we can have informed conversations.”

Furthermore, this is a project that Comey said could span through the next two presidential administrations.

“We are going to do this,” the FBI director continued, “One of the beauties of a 10-year term is I am not going to shut up about this. I have seven years to go.”

Ultimately, the goal of James Comey’s proposed policing data project would be to definitively answer questions about whether or not deadly force is applied disproportionately against minorities by police, he says:

“No one in this country knows whether the use of deadly force against any particular group — African-Americans most particularly — is up, down, or sideways over the last 10 years,” Comey told the committee. “Do we have an epidemic of violence? No one knows that. We could, we might not — we simply must gather the information so we can care deeply and solve these problems.”

James Comey’s testimony does sound good at first blush. And had the director’s reputation as an impartial arbiter of the law not been botched over the summer by the bureau’s handling of the Clinton email scandal investigation, there might even be a greater danger of congressmen joining hands to slap the all-powerful “bipartisan” label on this effort and push it forward in the name of “transparency.”

While the narrative of police disproportionately and indiscriminately gunning down unarmed black men is a popular one — and individual incidents generate easy, eye-grabbing headlines for media outlets — the statistics currently available would say otherwise.

A 2015 Washington Post study of police shootings — one of the newspaper pieces that Comey disparaged in the hearing — revealed that incidents of white law enforcement officers shooting unarmed black men accounted for less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Furthermore, multiple criminology studies have found that police were actually more hesitant to shoot black suspects who posed a credible threat (versus white suspects).

Giving the FBI and Department of Justice a federally-mandated periscope to look over the shoulder of every beat cop in the country will likely only exacerbate the phenomenon and put more police lives in danger by forcing them to second-guess themselves every time a suspect poses a credible threat.

While this might be an adequate diagnosis of the problem that popular racial policing narrative is, at best, poorly-informed, Comey’s solution is just another means of contributing to the Obama administration’s years-long efforts to centralize everyday policing in the United States.

Past proposals include the president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and the host of grants that serve as dangling carrots for local law enforcement to hand over more authority to the feds in exchange for funds.

Contrary to the “Hope and Change” narrative that the president sold voters, the Obama years have seen an unquestionable resurgence in racial tension in the United States. And this tension has been used as excuse at nearly every single instance as a vehicle to increase federal oversight and control over law enforcement — which, by nature, should be a local undertaking.

While James Comey’s FBI database may seem like a benign solution to questions about racial impetus in police shootings, it has to be viewed as part of a greater pattern to increase the DOJ’s presence over local law enforcement. (For more from the author of “James Comey Promises FBI Database to Track Race-Based Police Activity” please click HERE)

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