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: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics — independently of the FBI — also estimate the number of police homicides per year at around 400. But these estimates can be wrong. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “ Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR, relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data. But many UCR numbers are considered fairly reliable, 1 particularly fatal crimes like murder and manslaughter, according to Richard Rosenfeld, also a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri, who studies crime statistics. The simple UCR database does have plenty of limitations. For one, the data has holes in it: