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: and 33-year-old Channara Tom Pheap, who police killed on Aug. 26 in Tennessee. The Post’s analysis found police have killed around the same number of people each year — about 1,000 — since it began collecting the data. The data for 2020 appear on par with previous years. Incomplete data
Many academics using data on the number of police killings acknowledge a lack of data, resulting in underreporting. Two systems collect information on police shootings: 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.”