Title: Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government | US news | The Guardian
Headings: Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government
US policing
Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government
Tom McCarthy in New York
@TeeMcSee
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The uncounted

Content: “The point of this was to try to quantify the coverage error,” said Michael Planty, an author of the report. The years under study saw several high-profile homicides by law enforcement of unarmed civilians, such as the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in a train station in Oakland, California – an episode that would become the subject of the award-winning film Fruitvale Station – and the 2006 killing of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 bullets outside a nightclub in Queens, New York. But the majority of victims in law enforcement homicides for those years not only went unnamed – they went uncounted in any one tally. Even the two counting systems combined, as overseen by the FBI and BJS, missed an average of 263 homicides by law enforcement each year, BJS found. The uncounted
A recent report estimated that there were 7,427 law enforcement homicides in the US during the eight years spanning 2003-2009 and 2011 — or an average of 928 per year. The number is more than twice as large as the closest previous official tally from the US government. Even the two best tallies — combined — left an estimated 2,103 homicides uncounted during those years. 1,939
Bureau of Justice Statistics / arrest-related deaths only
1,681
BJS / FBI mutually counted
1,704
FBI / supplementary homicide reports only
2,103
Unobserved
SOURCE: Bureau of Justice Statistics
Academics and specialists have long been aware of flaws in the FBI numbers, which are based on voluntary submissions by local law enforcement agencies of paperwork known as supplementary homicide reports. No law requires local agencies to fill out the reports, and some agencies do not, especially not for officer-involved homicides, according to experts who have studied the issue.