Title: Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year | FiveThirtyEight
Headings: Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year
Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year
Content: 2 The NVSS includes the cause of death classifications “homicide” and homicide by “legal intervention”: the geneal equivalent of the SHR’s “justifiable police homicides” number. But the “legal intervention” deaths — an average of 406 per year from 1999 to 2011 3 — are not useful on their own since many police homicides are misclassified simply because the coroner’s report does not mention police involvement. This count, along with the FBI’s estimate and an independent count of “arrest-related homicides” by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2003 to 2009 4 complete the trio of official-sounding but incomplete police homicide stats. 5
The total number of homicides in the NVSS is considered reliable, and we can use that data to estimate how many homicides are missing from the SHR database. The chart below shows total killings, including “legal interventions,” complied by the NVSS from 1999 to 2011. We can compare this to the number of homicide victims (including those of “justifiable police homicides”) with entries in the raw FBI Supplementary Homicide Report data. 6
During this span, the NVSS database reported an average of 18,011 homicide deaths per year. The raw SHR data contained an average of 15,024 victims. ( The spike in 2001 is due to 2,823 homicides associated with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.)