It's absolutely insane that the answer to "Police aren't participating in a required program" is "let's shut it down and give up".
>“I’d be surprised if they didn’t make 60 percent,” said Bill Brooks, chief of the Norwood, Mass., police and a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police board of directors. He said a key problem is that many agencies that have no force incidents are failing to input “zero reports” each month, so the agency is counted as not participating. The IACP has long supported the data collection, and low participation numbers “make us look like we’re hiding something, when in reality I don’t think that’s the case.”
In the USA police power generally belongs to the states. The FBI can't just arbitrarily order state and local police to participate in their programs.
> The GAO report also says the Justice Department has largely ignored a requirement included in the 1994 crime bill to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “shall publish an annual summary of the data acquired.”
Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I read this as "the collection is required by the crime bill passed in 1994". Even if it's not, the FBI surely has carrots and sticks they can use to force participation.
But some agencies will resist anyhow because they are anti-Fed. Many rural areas have a giant mistrust of the Federal gov't. Incentives will just make them double-down. You know, the Culture Wars.
To get near 100% compliance would require both a strongly-worded law and strong enforcement.
On a more important note though, perhaps you should back down a bit from your authoritarian stance. It's not a good thing when your first reaction to people disagreeing with you is coercion justified by a complete lack of empathy.
That is a brazen redefinition of authoritarian.
You’re advocating for the federal government to seize authority that the sovereign states never granted it. It’s the textbook definition of authoritarianism.
The federal government gives away money and equipment to local police departments. Aside from the strawman tangent you went off on with regards to congress having to make some laws, all I suggested was that maybe the feds could just, you know, not give that money to the departments if they don't want to cooperate.
That's not even a little bit authoritarian. The local departments are completely within their rights to finance their budgets the old fashioned way and continue to be unaccountable, or at least accountable to their local citizens. Which is how it ought to be anyway. Funneling it through the feds is a terrible way to have any accountability.
This is is not authoritarianism.
[1] https://www.sfcityattorney.org/2021/03/04/final-victory-for-...
Immigration and marijuana restrictions on the other hand are actual laws that were passed by Congress and signed by the President.
In practice the federal government has a huge amount of influence over what states do because they are one of the most important sources of funding of many state programs, and they can and do set conditions for getting that money.
Police departments get billions of dollars of resources from the feds. There are already conditions to getting it, requiring that police report when someone is shot as a condition of federal funding is absolutely something that could be done without any new law or regulation.
The courts have set significant limits on the conditions that can be set[1]. Perhaps such withholding would pass legal muster, perhaps it wouldn't, but I guarantee you it would be challenged. Look at the defund sanctuary cities executive order court challenges[2][3]. There's plenty of precedent for the federal government to not be able to withhold funds because local agencies won't cooperate.
[1] https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20170323_R44797_36eb380...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/361297-federal-j...
[3] https://www.sfcityattorney.org/2021/03/04/final-victory-for-...