Title: Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People – Mother Jones
Headings: Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People
Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People
Plus: the crazy way the FBI classifies all police shooting victims as criminals.
Jaeah Lee
The FBI’s data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony.

Content: What they’ve uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don’t keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it’s a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year. However, as I and others have reported, there is some national data out there. It’s not complete, but it provides a general idea of how many people die at the hands of the police—and the significant racial disparity among them: • The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims’ race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown. • The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that’s about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.