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 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.) That’s a roughly 3,000-person gap. 7
Some of those 3,000 deaths are police homicides, justifiable and unjustifiable — there’s no way of knowing how many. They also include other homicides that are not reported to the SHR but which have nothing to do with police involvement — for example, killings that occur in federal jurisdictions. It’s likely there are homicides recorded in the SHR that should be attributed to police as “justifiable” but aren’t. And, as I mentioned earlier, there’s an unknown number of unjustifiable police homicides that aren’t marked with any evidence of police involvement.