General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnyone have a good source re. police shooting stats? Preferably broken down by race, sex, etc.?
I was watching Fox last nite and O'Reilly made several suspect assertions and referred the curious to his website for the statistical evidence.
I can't find anything there. ( If anyone else can, let me know.)
Otherwise... I'd like a dependable ( i.e. relatively unbiased) source.
djean111
(14,255 posts)there is no central database for stats on this. The federal government has no statistics, the police keep no statistics.
Any statistics you see, I believe, are the result of just combing through news stories and court records and such.
Deliberate, of course.
FreakinDJ
(17,644 posts)I'll dig it out for ya -check back in this thread
ctaylors6
(693 posts)Link: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s
Based on uniform crime reports. I don't think 2013 is complete yet. 2012 might still be missing some items also.
Not sure how much detail it has for what you're asking.
hlthe2b
(101,730 posts)that should say it all in terms of validity/reliability/representiveness.
kwassa
(23,340 posts)What Americas police departments dont want you to know
Police officers in the United States shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers. How many killings are there each year? No one can say for sure, because police departments dont want us to know.
According to the FBIs Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 justifiable homicides by police defined as the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.
The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like Brown, were unarmed.
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Two years ago, D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the Reno (Nev.) News & Review, launched FatalEncounters.org, an ambitious attempt to compile a comprehensive crowd-sourced database of fatal police shootings. Reports of the October 2012 killing of a naked, unarmed college student by University of South Alabama police made Burghart wonder how many such shootings there were; the fact that no one knew the answer made him determined to find it.
Burghart recently summed up what he has learned so far: You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men, he wrote on Gawker. You know who dies in the least population-dense areas? Mentally ill men. Its not to say there arent dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.
edit to add link to this new database on police shootings, just getting up and going.
http://www.fatalencounters.org/
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)cheyanne
(733 posts)It's a take-down of O'Reilly's fantasy stats.
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)It'll get me started, anyway.
eppur_se_muova
(36,227 posts)it's not enforced, and most have never filed.
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)Can't we get any electeds to speak to this? What's the point of passing the law if it's ignored at all levels of gov't?
Holding hearings in either house would seem appropriate.... but that's obviously not going to happen now.
Man from Pickens
(1,713 posts)Those stats don't exist, on purpose! Just part of the coverup of the epidemic of police violence.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)Anyone who says they know the real numbers is lying to you. We do not aggregate these numbers by policy.
We have no idea how many people police kill each year.