A law establishing a nationwide system to give police an early warning of threats against police officers was met with much fanfare when President Obama signed it last year, but is still in the planning stages 15 months later.
The Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu National Blue Alert Act of 2015, which was meant to launch a program similar to that used for Amber Alerts for missing children, promised to do "everything we can to help ensure the safety of our police officers when they’re in the line of duty," according to USA Today.
The piece of legislation -- named after two New York City police officers who were shot and killed in an ambush attack in 2014 -- moved quickly through Congress and passed both the House and Senate by a voice vote.
Following the deadly ambush attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge that left a total of eight officers dead, the Obama administration is facing new scrutiny after failing to implement any provision of the law. This year, at least 14 police officers have been killed in ambush attacks through July 20.
The Justice Department responded to the USA Today's request for information on the Blue Alert Act, saying that it is still in the implementation stages.
"Since the passage of the Blue Alert Act, the department has devoted time and consideration to ensure the most appropriate and well suited DOJ component lead this effort," Shannon Long of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services said. "In June, following a preliminary assessment of the Blue Alert program, the COPS Office was assigned to implement the program based on their extensive work and collaborative research on officer safety and wellness."
It took more than a year to determine which office within the DOJ would be responsible for implementing the law.
Long said her office will try to implement the portions of the law that don't require significant funding while it asks Congress for more money. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the system at $1 million.
Supporters of the law argue that the federal government shouldn't be creating a system from scratch since 27 have established Blue Alert programs. They say that the federal role is to encourage similar systems in other states and to link them together in one network.
