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: Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year | FiveThirtyEight
Aug. 19, 2014 ,         at 11:36 AM
Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year
By Reuben Fischer-Baum
Filed under Ferguson
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Frederick Scott protests the killing of Michael Brown on August 18, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Frederick Scott protests the killing of Michael Brown on August 18, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Earlier this month, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting and the response have reignited concerns about racial profiling, police brutality and police militarization. The incident has also drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police. Some reporting has put forward one of the only figures available: the approximately 400 “justifiable police homicides” each year since 2008, according to the FBI’s annual Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That data point has appeared with heavy caveats in a string of media reports, including in USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post. The statistic might seem solid at first glance.