Title: Another (Much Higher) Count Of Homicides By Police | FiveThirtyEight
Headings: Another (Much Higher) Count Of Homicides By Police
Another (Much Higher) Count Of Homicides By Police
Content: 10 incidents (7 percent) were killings by police officers acting outside the line of duty or accidental deaths. Examples include an officer who killed two women in a drunken-driving accident, a murder-suicide in which an officer killed his ex-wife, and a woman killed in a collision with a police SUV that was pursuing a suspect. These are all newsworthy deaths, but they aren’t examples of the use of deadly force by police officers in the line of duty. We wouldn’t necessarily expect a comprehensive governmental database of police killings to include them. By the narrowest measure possible — in which we give police every benefit of the “cause of death” doubt in incidents where they Tasered or restrained suspects – 85 percent of the sampled incidents were the sort of police killings the government might be expected to keep track of. If we include other arrest-related deaths (and they’re included in Bureau of Justice figures ), then 93 percent of incidents qualified as police killings. Applying these percentages to the total count at Killed By Police would imply that officers acting in the line of duty have killed in the neighborhood of 1,250 to 1,350 people since May 1, 2013. That’s about 1,000 deaths per year. This estimate isn’t directly comparable to the FBI’s “400 police homicides” count, because that figure is only available through 2012, and the previously mentioned caveats about media-report-driven counts apply. Nevertheless, it’s a good indication that “400 police homicides” isn’t a useful baseline number for the number of people killed by police each year.