Study Says Official Count Of Police Killings Is More Than 50% Lower Than The Actual Number
from the but-the-real-numbers-make-us-look-even-worse! dept
In 2019, the FBI claimed to be compiling the first-ever database of police use of force, including killings of citizens by officers. It was, of course, not the first-ever database of police killings. Multiple databases have been created (some abandoned) prior to this self-congratulatory announcement to track killings by police officers.
What this database would have, however, is information on use of force, which most private databases didn't track. Whether or not it actually does contain this info is difficult to assess, since the FBI's effort does not compile these reports in any easily-accessible manner, nor does it provide readable breakdowns of the data -- something it does for other things, like crimes against police officers.
It also does not have the participation of every law enforcement agency in the nation, which prevents the FBI from collecting all relevant information. It's also voluntary, so even participating agencies are free to withhold incident reports, keeping their own official use-of-force/killing numbers lower than what they actually may be.
The problem with underreporting traces back decades, though. The official count of police killings has always been lower than data compiled by non-government databases, which rely almost solely on open-source information like news reports. It would seem the numbers reported by the FBI would be higher, since it theoretically has access to more info, but the FBI's count has repeatedly been lower than outside reporting.
A recent study published by The Lancet says the official numbers are wrong. And they're off by a lot. Utilizing outside databases compiled by private citizens/entities and data obtained from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), the researchers have reached the conclusion that law enforcement self-reporting has resulted in undercounting the number of killings by officers by thousands over the past four decades.
We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups within the USA.
According to this study [PDF], the NVSS did not report 55% of deaths attributable to police violence, resulting in an undercount of ~17,000 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers. There are a lot of contributing factors, not the least of which is law enforcement's hesitancy to report or provide data on their own possible wrongdoing.
But there are other contributors. Misclassification of deaths often starts in the coroner's office. Some coroners and forensic examiners work hand-in-hand with local law enforcement, resulting in pressure to define cause of death as something unrelated to force applied by officers. One way to fix this ongoing contributor to underreporting is to protect coroners and examiners from other government agencies.
Coroners and forensic medical experts also propose that to avoid incorrect assignment of cause of death due to pressure from the police, politicians, or the deceased family members, forensic pathologists should work independently from law enforcement. Additionally, forensic pathologists often must investigate and testify in cases of police violence. To ensure that pathologists are free from pressures that could influence these cases, pathologists should be awarded whistleblower protections under the law.
The study also notes there is one proven way to reduce killings by police officers. It involves changing policies and laws.
Evidence suggests that there have been some successful reforms to reduce police violence from 1970 to 1985; 50 cities with populations larger than 250 000 residents halved their fatal police violence from 353 to 172 per year, primarily through banning shooting of non-violent fleeing suspects.
The things that don't work are the surface-level reform efforts cops actually agree to.
However, more recent reform efforts to prevent police violence in the USA, including body cameras, implicit bias training, de-escalation, and diversifying police forces, have all failed to further meaningfully reduce police violence rates.
To meaningfully reduce incidents of police violence, you first have to confront the problem. Bad data that downplays the number of violent acts committed by police officers allows agencies to pretend the problem isn't as bad as critics say it is. It also allows them to minimize their contribution to these deaths by relying on cause of death reports that skew towards law enforcement's narrative, rather than independent conclusions by medical experts. Bogus stats are a luxury we can't afford in this nation, not if we ever hope to return America to a place where the police serve the public, rather than behaving like warlords overseeing a never ending conflict.
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Filed Under: fbi, police, police brutality, police killings, tracking
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'That would be bad for us to admit soooo... no.'
It also does not have the participation of every law enforcement agency in the nation, which prevents the FBI from collecting all relevant information. It's also voluntary, so even participating agencies are free to withhold incident reports, keeping their own official use-of-force/killing numbers lower than what they actually may be.
FBI: Local police department have you killed anyone, an action that might require our involvement and carry the chance, if ever so slight, that you might be punished for?
Local police, looking at numerous corpses: Nope.
FBI: Well, you heard them, no need to dig any deeper into that I guess.
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Government... where we can just lie about facts to make ourselves feel better.
Shame lying isn't a crime, otherwise we'd have to call the....
nevermind.
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We should stop keeping track of the numbers of officers killed as well. Fair is fair.
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This is not surprising.
The FBI has been mandated by order of congress to track officer-involved homicide since before the new century. It's not new news that the FBI as an institution is resistant to full transparency on the matter.
I suspect the FBI's database techs have orders to forget any incident they can justify forgetting, id est if there's no other immediate external record they can find for it.
The FBI's database is not intended to be a definitive source. It's a place the back-the-blues can go to get low estimates that bolster their arguments.
This smacks a lot of the way official counts of drone strike casualties in official reports are lower by orders of magnitude than the ones reported by independent sources at the times they were happening. Piles of dead children don't look good for the CIA or the US Army. The latter has a long tradition of understating casualties. The former has a long tradition of lying to congress, the White House or anyone who dares question what its doing.
Similarly, piles of dead non-whites looks bad for the Department of Justice, so the FBI is motivated to create an official story as well, and it, too will undercount the dead.
But wait, there's more:
It's expected that a lot of police-involved killings are not successfully uncovered by private data spiders looking to track them. Local provincial precincts are notorious for shoddy record keeping, to the point that we can't accurately track the cause of most homicides. (Most are officer-failed-to-care.) Since CSI isn't tracing where bullets come from or if heart attacks and DOAs were really heart attacks and DOAs (rather than officer-smash-puny-suspect). So some officer-involved deaths take their secrets with them to the grave.
The numbers I read were similar to rape statistics, between 20% and 70% of officer-involved homicides going unreported (and undetected).
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Sure, why not?
...because whistleblower protections {sarcastic: always work so well}.
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Wolf in sheep's clothing:
Just like child abusers become priests and pedifiles become boy scout leaders,
Criminals become cops. Like Hydra, they control from within and hide in plain site.
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Half measures and all.
Just the good ol police state in action as conceptionly planned.
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Re: Perfect Statistics
...if we somehow had perfectly accurate & up to date data on American LEO's use of force/killings -- So What ??
Who do you expect to take meaningful action on such data ??
The data is useless unless somebody acts effectively upon it.
We know from long historical experience that police agencies are not interested in seriously policing themselves.
Government officials at every level are generally police cheerleaders and want more, better-armed cops controlling the populace.
Corporate media is also strongly pro-Cop.
Maybe the Salvation Army is interested in less police violence.
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Re:
... and cops should not routinely carry guns.
if guns are inherently dangerous for citizens to possess, does that inherent gun-danger vanish if we give cops a shiny badge along with their gun?
Maybe the 'Deputy Barney Fife' protocol has merit -- cops can carry guns, but they only get one bullet, kept in their shirt pocket.
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Re:
Can't have the FBI locking themselves up for hate crimes now. They never busted up the KKK because they are the KKK.
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Re: Wolf in sheep's clothing:
Dumb criminals end up in jail, smart criminals end up in law enforcement.
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Re:
"Sure, we'll just exaggerate the numbers we do have on hand to leverage government subsidies, procurement of military equipment, and present our position as far more sympathetic than we actually deserve."
The problem is that there's no move you can make here that the police wouldn't be able to take advantage of with their superior resources. Particularly the firepower.
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Re: Wolf in sheep's clothing:
"Just like child abusers become priests and pedifiles become boy scout leaders, Criminals become cops. Like Hydra, they control from within and hide in plain site."
And only in the US does the criminally naive idea exist that the profession with a badge and privilege to bear the violence monopoly will not attract the worst sort of scum alongside idealists.
This is why in Sweden, for instance, police training resembles a full Bachelor's degree with careful vetting and psych evaluation at every step whereas in the US it's a bare-bones 10 months after which it's the luck of the draw whether the new rookie learn to be a good cop under sensible tutelage...or whether he gets to be one of the two rookies who helped Chauvin out when he put his knee on George Floyd's throat. Or someone holding Henry Davis down while he was "destroying state property" by bleeding on the uniforms of a cop squad in his cell.
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