According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), seven years since the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) went into effect in 2014, requiring every state to report their recorded number of deaths data to the DOJ, at least 1,000 deaths that occurred in states during the fiscal year 2021 alone went unreported, writes Tim Cushing for TechDirt. While the DOJ is tasked with collecting this data and assuring compliance from state and local entities, it has not done so, with some of the issues being that data provided by states were incomplete or missing.
Of the 47 states that submitted data, only two provided 100 percent of records with all the required elements, while seven did not report any records with all the required components. In addition, because many states do not accurately account for all deaths, the GAO warns that the thousand unreported deaths may actually be an undercount.