Eric Garner’s Death Won’t Even Show Up in FBI Stats on Police Homicides

Reason has previously noted
that for 2013, violent crime in the United States is down, killing
of police officers (and violence directed toward police officers)
is
down, but
homicides by police that were subsequently ruled justified were
up. Law enforcement officers killed more than 400 people in
2013.

But that number is known to be inaccurate. The FBI tracks
justified homicides by police, but participation is voluntary.
There is no actual national tracking of deaths at the hands of
police unless they are to determined to be crimes and therefore
show up in violent crime statistics. We don’t have a real, credible
number of how many people the police kill every year. So
The Wall Street Journal attempted to
compare numbers from law enforcement agencies with the numbers
on the FBI’s reports between the years 2007 and 2012. They found
more than 500 deaths at the hands of law enforcement agencies
unaccounted for in the FBI’s reports. They conclude “it’s nearly
impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police
each year”:

The reports to the FBI are part of its uniform crime reporting
program. Local law-enforcement agencies aren’t required to
participate. Some localities turn over crime statistics, but not
detailed records describing each homicide, which is the only way
particular kinds of killings, including those by police, are
tracked by the FBI. The records, which are supposed to document
every homicide, are sent from local police agencies to state
reporting bodies, which forward the data to the FBI.

The Journal’s analysis identified several holes in the FBI
data.

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.

The State of New York does not participate in the reporting
program, according to the Journal, and therefore 68
homicides by New York City Police Department officers between the
years 2007 to 2012 are not even in the FBI’s count. It also means
that
Eric Garner’s choking death at the hands of officers from the
NYPD will not show up in the numbers next year when the FBI
releases its statistics for 2014.  

Read the Wall Street Journal analysis
here.