Plus: the crazy way the FBI
classifies all police shooting victims as criminals.
—By Jaeah Lee
Since a police officer shot and
killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and
researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or
kill civilians. 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.
Note: Most arrest-related
deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate
calculated by dividing deaths by the average Census population for each race in
2003-09. "Other" includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians,
Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.
• The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics System offers another view
into officers' use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who
died by "legal intervention" involving a firearm discharge. In
theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it
does not include legal executions).
The CDC's cause-of-death data,
based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a
profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968
and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at
the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a
black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop
than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2-to-1 between 2003 and 2009,
lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years.
The CDC's database of emergency room records also shows similar racial
disparities among those injured by police.
However, these numbers provide
an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For
reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, the
Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable
and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the
FBI's broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their
justifiable homicide figures in 2012. New York state, for example, does not
report justifiable homicides to the FBI, according to bureau spokesman Stephen
G. Fischer Jr.
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.
It's also not clear that
Brown's death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the
FBI's data in the first place. (Ferguson reported two homicides to the 2012
Uniform Crime Report, but neither were justifiable homicides, according to
Fischer.) The FBI's justifiable homicide 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. "A felon in this case
is someone who is committing a felony criminal offense at the time of the
justifiable homicide," according to a statement provided by Uniform Crime
Reporting staff. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook describes the
following scenario to illustrate what constitutes the justifiable killing of a
criminal caught in the act:
A police officer answered a
bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the
responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the
robber. The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in
such cases.
And since the classification of
felonies—usually serious criminal offenses such as murder and assault—may vary
by jurisdiction, UCR staff states, there is no standard definition of the word.
This leaves much room for
interpretation. Was Michael Brown committing a felony at the time Officer
Darren Wilson shot him? Local authorities in Ferguson have claimed that Brown
was a robbery suspect and that he assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting.
Whether Brown's case might be classified as a justifiable homicide hinges on
the details of what happened in the moments before his death and whether local
investigations determine that Wilson was justified to shoot. The FBI's records
ultimately rely on police departments' word and the assumption that the victim
was a criminal.
BJS, meanwhile, collects its
data from state-level coordinators that identify arrest-related deaths in part
by surveying law enforcement agencies. But the majority of these coordinators
do not contact each law enforcement agency in their states, so BJS has no way
of telling how many deaths have gone unidentified, according to spokesperson
Kara McCarthy. BJS collects some details about each reported death, such as how
the victims died, whether they were armed, whether they were intoxicated or
displayed signs of mental illness, and whether charges had been filed against
them at the time of death. It does not collect information about whether the
victims had any prior convictions.
Some of the gaps in the FBI and
BJS data can be filled in by the CDC data, but there are limitations here, too.
The CDC data does not evaluate whether these killings were justified or not.
The agency categorizes fatalities by International Classification of Diseases
codes, which are used by coroners and medical examiners to record the medical
cause, not the legal justification, of death. And death certificates aren't
immune to reporting problems, explains Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC's
Mortality Statistics Branch. This data is still "at the mercy of the
medical examiner and coroner," who often write death certificates and may
not include details about officer involvement. Anderson says those details are
necessary in order for the CDC to categorize a death as a legal intervention.
Better data, and the will to
collect it, is necessary to get the full picture of how many criminals and
law-abiding citizens are killed by police every year. Until then Michael
Brown—and others like him—may never even become a statistic.
