It's not often these days that the Missouri Legislature matches its law-and-order rhetoric with action. In fact, state lawmakers are too often going in the other direction — making it easier for criminals to get guns, for example, while making it harder for local leaders to confront gun violence.

So it's encouraging that a new state law requires police departments in Missouri to provide use-of-force data to a federal project that will look for patterns that could better assess why some police confrontations go bad. Credit where it's due: That law has already had a dramatic impact on the response rate for the information out of Missouri, with those numbers sure to grow.

The FBI's National Use-of-Force Data Collection program began operation in 2019, in part in reaction to the years-long spate of deadly police encounters with the public that by then already looked epidemic. There was a strong perception that Black Americans were being disproportionately subjected to police violence, but evidence of it was only anecdotal because data on police use of force wasn't gathered on a national scale.

"We simply don't know" the patterns of the violence, then-FBI Director James Comey said in 2016. "As a country, we have not bothered to collect the data, to collect the information. And in the absence of information, we have anecdotes. We have videos."

The program sought to remedy that with requests to police agencies around the country for demographic data about the citizens upon whom force was used — race, ethnicity, etc. — along with the general circumstances and other information. The point isn't to second-guess specific cases (identifying information about the officers and subjects isn't included in the data) but to get a big-picture look at how force is used by police.

The problem is, it was a request rather than a directive, and a majority of police departments around the country, including in Missouri, initially declined. It's not clear if that was because police departments weren't eager to provide information that could make them look bad or if they were merely uninterested in adding one more task to their already substantial list. Either way, it meant Missouri was flying blind.

The law the Legislature passed last year, which went into effect in March, changed that. It requires all police departments in the state to submit the data within the coming year. As the Post-Dispatch's Josh Renaud reports, more than 200 police departments in Missouri have provided the data so far this year (up from just 36 last year) with the rest presumably on its way, since state law requires it.

It's too early to say what the data trends will show about police use of force, in Missouri or nationally. But here, at least, the information will finally give police, policy makers and the public a clear look at the issue and a better chance to constructively address it.

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