Was George Floyd killed by a police officer?
The official answer, according to a newly revealed set of federal government records, is no.
Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, anyone who dies in law enforcement custody, like during an arrest, must be reported to the Department of Justice. If the death resulted from police use of force, as Floyd’s did, it is labeled “use of force by a law enforcement or corrections officer.” But, when an unredacted copy of four years of data was inadvertently posted on a government website late last year, Floyd’s case was listed under a different category, “homicide” — which refers to deaths at the hands of another civilian, not law enforcement.
The error shows how even one of the most notorious cases of police violence, one that led to a murder conviction for the officer, can be hidden in the official statistics.
A Marshall Project review of the data found that this inaccuracy was one of many plaguing the government’s record of in-custody deaths. We identified hundreds of people who died in custody but weren’t listed, and entire states that failed to report almost any deaths in their prisons or in their jails. The overwhelming majority of the records did not meet the Justice Department’s own minimum standards for accuracy and completeness. About one in six didn’t specify the manner of death.
Despite these failures, the Justice Department has never once used the law’s ability to withhold a portion of federal funding from law enforcement agencies that fail to accurately report deaths in custody.
The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of policymakers, Justice Department officials, police, congressional representatives and researchers — all of whom described how deep cultural barriers across law enforcement and government have made it virtually impossible to fulfill the law’s goal of reducing deaths in custody.
Rep. Bobby Scott, one of the law’s original sponsors, said he has been waiting for decades for the Department of Justice to fully enact it.
“I’d like to see the law implemented so that we can have data to show how many people are dying in custody … and if there are any patterns that we can address to reduce the number,” he said. “That’s why we passed the law.”
After roughly 25,000 unredacted death records from 2019 to 2023 were made available online late last year, The Marshall Project checked them against independent sources on in-custody deaths, including news reports and academic research.
We found at least 681 deaths missing from the federal count — a number that would almost certainly rise if more complete data were available nationwide.
We identified over 450 death records absent from Louisiana, where researchers from Loyola University maintain their own independent resource documenting deaths in custody. Linda Gautier, a manager at the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, explained that before state officials send data about an in-custody death to the Justice Department, local police must first submit a report. “Compliance with that requirement is not always achieved,” she said.
The federal records contained only one jail death reported from Mississippi. State officials acknowledged that “local and county law enforcement agencies are not actively participating in the death in custody reporting requirement and when reminded to do so, the lack of understanding of the death in custody federal law results in a failure to report.”
Many highly publicized deaths were absent. As The Guardian reported, the death of Indiana jail detainee Joshua McLemore, whose family was awarded a $7.25 million settlement after he “died in the summer of 2021 from dehydration and malnutrition [and] was left naked in solitary confinement for three weeks with no medical attention” was not there. Nor was Alan Willison, who, The Appeal reported, died in a Georgia jail after he “begged for medical help for nearly two months before succumbing to testicular cancer.” Following Willison’s death, the jail instituted reforms, like replacing the private company running health care in the facility.
Click here for an in-depth breakdown on how we obtained the data and conducted our analysis.
The vast majority of entries had serious record-keeping problems, with information routinely missing or outdated.
More than 4,200 records marked the manner of death as “unavailable, investigation pending,” which was also the most commonly listed manner of death across all jails. Over 700 contained no age information for the person who died. Roughly 2,500 specified no location of death. More than 2,800 entries lacked race. About 800 entries did not include the law enforcement agency responsible for the person at the time of the death.
Nearly two-thirds of records from Harris County, Texas, where jail deaths have become a community flashpoint, contained virtually no information beyond “pending autopsy results,” even in cases that were years old.
The entry for Lashawn Thompson, who died three years ago in a filthy, insect-ridden jail in Atlanta, described his cause of death as “Pending” and the location as “Not reported.” His death led to a congressional inquiry, and a Justice Department investigation found that conditions in the facility were “unlawful and dangerous.”
Names of the dead were often wrong, spelled incorrectly or completely missing. More than two-thirds of the people who died in Virginia were named “Decedent,” which means a person who has died. More than fifty people from Illinois were named “unknown.”
The Marshall Project randomly selected around 1,000 entries to perform a more detailed review. More than three-quarters of this sample did not meet the government’s own minimum criteria for describing each death.
Officials from the Office of Justice Programs, the arm of the Justice Department managing the data collection, did not provide a comment on the record. In 2024, the agency published a blog post summarizing its current progress on the data collection. “[W]hile we have much more to do, we are making significant headway and we are deeply committed to finding ways to prevent and reduce deaths in custody.”
Drawing on the most recent annual data available from both the official records that exist and estimates by research and nonprofit groups, more than 5,000 people likely died in state and federal prisons in 2021, over 1,000 in local jails in 2019 and over 1,000 in arrest-related interactions with police in 2024. But experts say that we can’t know whether these numbers are accurate.
In the 1990s, the unknowns around in-custody deaths drove reporter Mike Masterson to write a series of stories for the Asbury Park Press and the Northwest Arkansas Times. “The actual toll is unknown because no one, including the federal government, bothers keeping track,” Masterson wrote.
Masterson traveled to Washington, D.C., handing out copies of his articles to lawmakers. Some took notice; the Death in Custody Reporting Act passed in 2000 and got off to a promising start with the Justice Department’s statistical agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, collecting death reports from state prison systems and local jails. But reporting of arrest-related deaths, the responsibility of America’s nearly 18,000 police agencies, was a different story.
“When we were collecting it, I would get their general counsel [calling] me, you know some sheriff or some police department, [saying] 'Oh yeah, we got this letter from you to report these cases … do we have to?'” said Mike Planty, a former deputy director at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
After several years of poor results, the arrest-related part of the program was suspended. However, in 2014, as Black Lives Matter protesters demanded new accountability for law enforcement following several high-profile police killings such as those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Congress updated the legislation with a new penalty for states whose agencies didn’t report death data — withholding a portion of the grant money the federal government gives out for criminal justice programs like indigent defense and crime victim support.
The public, it seemed, cared about deaths in custody. And the Department of Justice seemed to care, too. The agency piloted an ambitious effort to fix its historical challenges tracking arrest-related deaths by reaching out directly to local jurisdictions instead of relying on state agencies, and independently adding death reports from news articles and open-source databases.
But that plan never came to fruition.
Arguing it would put too much administrative burden on police agencies, the Trump administration scrapped the proposal. Around the same time, department lawyers decided that the law’s updated penalty meant the program had to be taken away from the experts at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, whose work was intended solely for research purposes, not enforcement. Since states that didn’t report in-custody deaths could have their grant money cut, attorneys argued, the program now had an enforcement component.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. Ethan Corey and Joshua Vaughn, who have reported extensively on custodial deaths and the Death in Custody Reporting Act, pointed out that the law had always had an enforcement component, since the original version required agencies to report deaths in order to be eligible for federal Truth-in-Sentencing grants. “That initially legitimate justification maybe turned into an excuse to just stop … paying for what was really an expensive data collection program … [that] didn’t necessarily align with the ideological priorities of the administration in power,” Corey told The Marshall Project.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics also oversees the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a program to analyze incidents of sexual assault in prison and implement changes to prevent them in future, which has a significant regulation compliance component.
All the same, in what would prove a disastrous move for the data, the department shifted the program to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a grant-making agency. While the Bureau of Justice Statistics remained authorized to collect death data from federal agencies, its final dataset from state and local facilities came in 2019 — just before COVID-19 began spreading nationwide.
The rollback produced the same problems that existed before, now exacerbated under an agency without the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ experience and expertise. The data The Marshall Project analyzed, with its litany of problems, was collected by the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Earlier this year, a lawsuit by USA Today forced the Department of Justice to publish records from the last four years the program was run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2015 through 2019.
When we compared the names of incarcerated people who died in Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina with the Loyola University database, we found that 96% were also in the records collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. When we did the same for the newer Bureau of Justice Assistance-era data, the match rate was only 62%.
The Justice Department’s own inspector general’s office warned that moving the program could lead to incomplete data. “Without complete information about deaths in custody, the Department will be unable to achieve [the law’s] primary purpose,” the office wrote in a 2018 report.
“This is a poster child for how not to get something done,” said Jeffrey Sedgwick, a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, who now helps states report in-custody deaths.
Sedgwick said the new penalty structure is unlikely to meaningfully change the behavior of law enforcement agencies, because it hits grants given to the states aggregating the data, not the local law enforcement agencies that are meant to originally record it. For some agencies that receive little or no grant funding, it may be less expensive to accept the penalty than to spend the money required to properly report to the data collection program.
“If you listen to the audience that you’re asking to report, they pretty much look at you and they say, ‘Well, the cost is falling on me to collect this data and report it,’” said Sedgwick. “‘What’s in it for me?’”
“Following the law is in it for you,” said David Janovsky, a policy analyst for the Project on Government Oversight who has analyzed the law’s implementation. “It had a penalty in it, because asking nicely was not seen as being enough.”
Bree Spencer, senior program director for justice at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that for all the debate about the penalty, the Department of Justice has never actually used it.
Matt Dummermuth, a former head of the Office of Justice Programs, responded to the irony of so many in government celebrating the penalty’s introduction only to be met with the department’s refusal to wield the stick it had been given. “Sometimes you do need new laws,” Dummermuth said, “but often [what’s important is] just enforcing the ones you already have.”
Janovsky said there were reasons the department was hesitant to do more to enforce the law and publish the data. “It’s embarrassing to DOJ because [the data is] bad, it’s embarrassing to cops because they’re killing people, it’s embarrassing to prisons because they are letting people die in their custody,” he said. “And so agencies want to avoid releasing the data.”
Where the federal government has stumbled, some states have had success collecting data and turning it into meaningful change.
In 2021, Washington state passed a law establishing a committee to conduct an intensive collection and review of the information surrounding every in-custody death. By combining medical records from the state with records provided by the deceased’s loved ones, the committee aims to identify patterns that could prevent future deaths.
For example, when the data pointed to a pattern of suicides clustered at a particular location in a prison, the committee alerted the state’s Corrections Department, which installed a barrier on a second-floor balcony, reducing the risk of someone jumping. The committee also advised the department to set up a crisis hotline to help incarcerated people dealing with suicidal thoughts.
Though it’s too early to gauge the program’s full impact, fewer incarcerated people in Washington died last year than before it was initiated. Ollie Webb, an assistant ombudsperson and member of the committee, attributes its successes to detailed data access and regular progress checks on how the Corrections Department follows through on their recommendations.
If you’re searching for answers while mourning the loss of a loved one who died behind bars, check out this guide on how to request information from a prison or jail.
Indeed, the federal data itself has, when good enough, also been used effectively to inform policy. A 2024 report, prepared for the National Institute of Justice, found a link between jail overcrowding and preventable deaths and made recommendations for how to improve conditions, like deploying contraband detection technologies and reducing the use of solitary confinement.
“There is a model, we see how it’s working,” Webb said. “How can that be shared to other states?”
But getting that same level of commitment nationwide has proven difficult.
During a meeting about data sharing with FBI officials in the early 2000s, Sedgwick, the former Bureau of Justice Statistics director, recalls being told that, for police, crime data is “to be shared with their brothers in blue on a need-to-know basis only; it is not to be shared with social scientists, it’s not to be shared with the press,” because, “you pointy-headed little social scientists get hold of our data, you do studies, you print articles, and police chiefs get fired.”
Several experts agreed that law enforcement agencies often distrust civilian oversight and may withhold information, or misunderstand federal reporting requirements due to poor communication.
Former FBI assistant director Thomas Bush, who previously ran some of the bureau’s other data collection efforts, said the agency collaborates with local law enforcement to develop the policies they will eventually have to implement — a potential model for tracking deaths in custody.
“We built everything we built in conjunction with our law enforcement partners in the community,” said Bush. “We’ve been doing it for years and years, and most people do volunteer to submit their information.”
The idea of merging the in-custody death tracking program with the FBI’s existing efforts has been floated inside the Justice Department. Bush said this approach could help alleviate some of the most intractable problems surrounding implementation of the Death in Custody Reporting Act.
Another idea is to replace the current system, in which each state must collect and submit reports from local agencies, a process that has led to widespread problems, with a centralized data portal run by the Justice Department. One unified platform could streamline the process and help reduce the apathy and confusion it has sometimes caused.
Similarly, the Department of Justice could go back to reaching out directly to local jurisdictions for their data, or even move the program back to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, where it saw more success. Congress could also, for the first time, appropriate dedicated funding for the program.
While the Justice Department made modest progress under the Biden administration, including setting up assistance programs and compliance guidelines to support jurisdictions’ reporting efforts and using outside datasets to evaluate the collected data, it hasn’t been enough to address the program’s larger flaws.
Twenty-five years after the law was passed, the federal government still does not know how many people die in custody, and the data collection today is worse than it was a decade ago.
“It makes perfect sense, and no sense at all,” said Jay Aronson, Carnegie Mellon University professor and co-author of the book “Death in Custody.” “The only reason it makes sense is … if the goal is to actually not know, and to do everything you can not to know.”