Police killings recorded over the course of seven years have been under-counted by more than half, an astonishing figure, according to a new Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis.
One cannot feel good about living under gangsters.
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic
That the gang operates under legal sanction makes no difference. It is a gang nonetheless, and there is no other word to describe an armed band of collection agents.
Police killings recorded over the course of seven years have been under-counted by more than half, an astonishing figure, according to a new Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis.
Deaths at the hands of law enforcement, especially among Black males, have been a rallying cry for justice and reform by African-Americans across the country. This report illuminates the concerns and begs for new policies on tracking police-related shootings.
The BJS says documented killings by cops were half of what it found in its research from 2003 to 2009 and 2011.
Federal agencies track nationwide police-caused deaths through BJS’s Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) and the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also tracks law enforcement homicides through the National Vital Statistics Report. However, this tally wasn’t included in the new analysis.
The data’s flaws make it virtually impossible to know the actual level of racial disparities in police use of force, which became a topic of national discussion following the police shooting death of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August.
“The available data (FBI, Vital Stats, BJS) are worse than miserable,” David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, wrote in an email to Vox. “They suck and no one should do any sort of analysis with them beyond using them to say that we have some floor [regarding] shootings and perhaps note that there are all sorts of circumstances involved when shootings occur.”
The Obama administration criticized the flawed statistics in recent months, unaware of their level of inaccuracy. “The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,” outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder said to The Hill. “This strikes many — including me — as unacceptable.”
