Title: How many police shootings a year? No one knows - The Washington Post
Headings: How many police shootings a year? No one knows
How many police shootings a year? No one knows
Content: In the absence of reliable data, the FBI’s “justifiable homicides” statistics continues to be widely cited in academic studies, media reports, and other examinations of the use of lethal force by law enforcement despite being decried as unreliable by officials inside the Justice Department and other officials outside of the government. Advertisement
As they do, criminal justice experts note that even compiling accurate numbers of people shot and killed by the police would be just a start. “Every study that I’m aware of shows that most of the people who are shot by the cops survive and most of the time when cops shoot the bullets don’t hit,” said Klinger, who will soon publish a new study analyzing police shootings in St. Louis. That study, prepared with several other academics, found that there were 230 instances in the City of St. Louis between 2003 and 2012 when officers fired their weapons. Only 37 of those fired upon were killed. “If your statistics look just at dead bodies you’d be under-counting it by 85 percent,” Klinger said. “ If the cops are shooting, we need to now when they are shooting, not just when they kill somebody with the bullets.” Kimberly Kindy contributed to this report. Today's Headlines
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