Title: Fact check: How many unarmed Black men did police kill in 2019?
Headings: Fact check: Police killed more unarmed Black men in 2019 than conservative activist claimed
Fact check: Police killed more unarmed Black men in 2019 than conservative activist claimed
The claim: U.S. police killed eight unarmed Black men in 2019
What the data shows
Incomplete data
Our ruling: False
Our fact-check sources:

Content: The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which collects data from more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System, which compiles death certificate data. According to research by criminologists published in the National Library of Medicine, the NVSS underestimates police homicides because it “misclassifies cases as homicides, rather than justifiable homicides committed by police officers, because certifiers fail to mention police involvement.” The researchers found the FBI’s system, which does not gather data from all law enforcement agencies, similarly “misses cases because some jurisdictions fail to file reports or omit justifiable homicides committed by police officers.” PBS reported in August that the lack of sound information surrounding police shootings is so widespread that “a decade ago, the Department of Justice stopped collecting data on deaths tied to police violence because the numbers were unreliable ... Reporting these cases was voluntary, and there were virtually no incentives for police departments to submit this information to the federal government.” Examples of questionable reporting of the causes of police shootings are many. When police shot 39-year-old Tommy Smith outside his mother’s house in Illinois, authorities declared his death a “suicide by cop” despite lacking evidence. “Suicide by cop” is a vague term that the Guardian — a publication that also created its own police fatality database — reported contradicts the National Association of Medical Examiners’ guidelines for determining cause of death. The Guardian reported in 2015 that the police killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, all of whom were unarmed when they died, were “missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.” The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a unit within the Department of Justice, released in 2016 a redesigned study using reports from media outlets, surveys of law enforcement agencies, medical examiners’ and coroners’ offices to produce an improved estimate of arrest-related deaths between June 1, 2015, and March 31, 2016.