By Tom McKay December 3, 2014
The news: As activists around
the country protest the killing of Staten Island resident and unarmed black man
Eric Garner, a new investigation by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that
police officers kill suspects at a much higher rate than suggested by existing
federal records.
The WSJ analysis found that
more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national
tally between 2007 and 2012. The difference isn't minor. It's hundreds of
deaths that essentially fell into a black hole.
With public demands for
transparency on such killings on the rise following the August shooting death
of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, activists are
demanding that authorities be held accountable for the unjustified deaths of
civilians across the country.
The data: Previous analyses,
such as a USA Today investigation that concluded white cops kill black suspects
almost two times a week, relied on an FBI database of police killings that
listed around 400 police killings a year. But the WSJ's investigation revealed
what many already suspected: The FBI database is woefully incomplete, since
many local police aren't actually required to report who they kill to any
higher authority.
In total, the WSJ came up with
over 1,800 killings - 45% more than the FBI's statistics. And that's just from
the 105 largest police departments. Elsewhere, many more dead suspects are
likely uncounted by the federal government. The result, the WSJ's Rob Barry and
Coulter Jones write, is that "It is nearly impossible to determine how
many people are killed by the police each year."
But when the paper expanded the
scope of its investigation, the results were downright chilling:
"The full national scope
of the underreporting can't be quantified. In the period analyzed by the
Journal, 753 police entities reported about 2,400 killings by police. The large
majority of the nation's roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies didn't report
any."
Even those participating in the
FBI's data-reporting program are failing to do so with complete precision:
"Justifiable police
homicides from 35 of the 105 large agencies contacted by the Journal didn't
appear in the FBI records at all. Some agencies said they didn't view
justifiable homicides by law-enforcement officers as events that should be
reported. The Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia, for example, said
it didn't consider such cases to be an "actual offense," and thus
doesn't report them to the FBI.
For 28 of the remaining 70
agencies, the FBI was missing records of police killings in at least one year.
Two departments said their officers didn't kill anyone during the period
analyzed by the Journal."
On its own, this looks bad
enough. But once the documented tendency of police officers to fire upon black
suspects at a much higher rate than white ones, it looks even worse. The ACLU
has determined that the vast majority of SWAT deployments are targeted at black
and Latino suspects.
Based on the limited federal
data, ProPublica previously determined that young black males are around 21
times as likely to be killed by police officers than their white counterparts.
Why it matters: The importance
of these findings can't be understated. If federal authorities don't have a
clear idea of the scale of the problem they might not be able to formulate a
coherent response. Without oversight, killings like Garner's may continue to
happen without any real consequences or a national strategy to avoid them.
"There isn't a mandatory
reporting. It is a self-reporting, almost on the honor system," CNN legal
analyst Sunny Hostin said on Tuesday.
As more and more Americans
question the violent relationship between law enforcement and citizens, it's
clear that the way government officials measure police killings is in dire need
of reform. Let's hope reform comes soon: If the deaths of Michael Brown and
Eric Garner are any indication, the stakes are far too high for just an 'honor
system.'
