More Than 1,000 People Have Been Killed by Police in 2014

There are no frills to be found
at http://ift.tt/1zjZeQn. The
site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains,
though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person
documented to have been killed by police in the United States in
2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single
death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and
race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve
noted previously, there is no reliable national database for
keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year.
The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but
participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As
I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York
Police Department
won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the
state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers
killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its
start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report,
they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May
and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the
whole year.

And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site
has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about
a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at
the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it’s possible
the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April.
Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a
two-decade high in killings by police.

Neither the site nor its Facebook page
indicates who is responsible for compiling this information, and
they’re protecting their identity by hosting the site through
GoDaddy. We can’t talk to whoever is responsible for this database
about how or why they started it and how much effort it is to keep
track of this information. Here is a page for people to submit information
to help improve the quality of the database.