WASHINGTON — Congress, concerned about police brutality, ordered the U.S. Department of Justice in 1994 to track the use of force by police officers.

        But the way the information has been collected makes it impossible for the public to know which police departments have the most problems.

        Several police shootings, including last week's death of unarmed Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati, have exposed racial tensions and led civil-rights leaders to complain about a pattern of excessive force against minorities and the poor.

        The federal government has no database on officer-involved shootings, and the information the Justice Department gathered on police use of force does not allow for comparisons by city or police department.

        Since January 1995, Cincinnati police have killed 15 African-American suspects.

        Six were armed with guns, another took away an officer's gun. One was armed with a knife, one wielded a brick, another held a board with nails in it.

        Three, including Mr. Thomas, were not armed.

        Two of the incidents involved suspects in cars, one of which ultimately dragged an officer to his death in September 2000. But without national data it is difficult to determine whether the department has had a disproportionate number of police shootings compared with cities of similar size.

        “If you don't have this information, you don't really know what's going on,” said Rachel King, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. The group has sued the city of Cincinnati for what it claims is a 30-year history of racial misconduct by police.

More issues reviewed
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft backed a proposal in Congress for a national study on racial profiling after several reports indicated police stop or arrest minorities more often than whites. Ms. King and aides to several lawmakers said other police-related issues also may be reviewed this year, including officer-involved shootings.
               Last year, Congress approved legislation requiring the Justice Department to compile quarterly reports on the number of deaths in:

        • Local jails.

        • Prisons.

        • Police custody.

        • The process of arrest.

        States that refuse to comply could lose federal money.

        But the Justice Department has not decided whether police shootings are considered part of an arrest and should be covered in the reports. Rep. Robert Scott, a Virginia Democrat who worked on the legislation, said fatal police shootings should be included.

        “You can't do anything until you know how many there are,” Mr. Scott said. “You'd see trends and similarities that would offer areas of possible legislation or possible police training.”

        Anger over allegations of police brutality, particularly against minorities, has caused riots and unrest in several cities in the past decade. The worst incidents, such as the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991 and the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York in 1999, have prompted calls for police reform.

        Police officials maintain that obvious cases of brutality are rare and that much of the civil unrest is from socioeconomic factors that go well beyond complaints about aggressive law enforcement.

Survey questions force
An anti-crime bill in 1994 directed the Justice Department to compile data on the use of force by police while protecting the identity of victims and police officers. In response, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has surveyed people about their contact with police.
               In 1999, the latest year for which figures are available, researchers found that 43.8 million people — including people who called to report a crime — had contact with police and less than 1 percent experienced force or threats of force. That figure was double, or 2 percent, among African-Americans and Hispanics.

        More than half of the contacts with police involved traffic stops. African-American drivers were more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers and more likely to be stopped more than once during the year, according to the survey.

        Men, young people, blacks and Hispanics were more likely to report experiencing force or threats of force, the survey found. In most cases — 72 percent — people said officers pushed or grabbed them, while 15.3 percent said police pointed a gun at them, 10.2 percent claimed they were kicked or hit and 5.4 percent said they were sprayed with chemicals or pepper.

        None of the people the Bureau of Justice Statistics interviewed reported being shot or bitten by a police dog, which highlights the limitations of such a survey.

        Other than withholding federal funds, the government does not have a way to compel states or law-enforcement agencies to share data. Justice Department officials say privately it is difficult to obtain complete and accurate crime statistics from some police agencies. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which began in 1930 and is the government's most complete annual snapshot of crime, is voluntary and does not include statistics from all agencies.

        The International Association of Chiefs of Police, an Alexandria, Va.-based police advocacy group, received Justice Department money to start a national database on police use of force. Yet only 319 of the 18,000 law-enforcement agencies nationwide participate in the project, and the information is voluntary and anonymous.

        The association's latest report found that police officers used force about 3.5 times for every 10,000 calls for service, leading the group's president to conclude at the time that “police officers resort to using force in only an extremely limited number of situations.”

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