While FBI Finds Police Killings on the Rise, Real Number of Killings Remains Unknown

Fatal police shootings were higher in 2013 than they’ve been in two decades, according to new FBI data. But experts say the figures fail to give an accurate picture of police killings.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which collects data voluntarily submitted by police departments, looked only at killings which police considered “justifiable homicide,” defined by the bureau as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.”

There were 461 justifiable homicides reported last year, up from 426 in 2012. But the limited figures pose another question: how many people do police really kill?

As Radley Balko writes at Washington Post, “[U]nofficial attempts to compile a more thorough count of killings by police have put the figure much, much higher —as many as 1,700 since May 2013, and more than 900 so far in 2014.”

The FBI’s numbers “are bullshit,” journalist D. Brian Burghart, who operates FatalEncounters.org, told Common Dreams. “They’re widely known to be inaccurate.” The only approach is for a non-governmental organization to collect the data, as Fatal Encounters, Killed by Police, the Gun Violence Archive, and other dedicated groups are doing, Burghart said.

There is no question that the numbers are wrong, Burghart said. “It’s just a question of how wrong they are.”

As ThinkProgress notes, some states, such as Florida, chose not to report any death count information for years—so the increase in FBI statistics could simply be the result of more jurisdictions reporting, rather than an increase in killings. Likewise, in many jurisdictions, police departments don’t require justifiable homicide reports to include the names of officers or the deceased, Burghart said.

But without accurate information, it is impossible to parse the data. “It is irresponsible that we don’t have a complete set of numbers,” University of Nebraska criminologist Samuel Walker told USA Today. “Whether the numbers are up, down or stable, this (national database) needs to be done. … This is a scandal.”