pbs | HARI SREENIVASAN: The nation’s been focused on
Staten Island, Ferguson, and Cleveland in the last few weeks as citizens
and law enforcement assess how they have and how they should deal with
one another.
This as a new investigation by the The Wall Street
Journal reveals that accounting for killings by police might be grossly
underestimated.
Wall Street Journal reporter Rob Barry joins us now. So, how did you do your reporting, and what did you find?
ROB BARRY:
Thanks for having me. What we did was we asked about 105 departments to
give us the number of people who have been killed over a five or six
year period.
And we compared those numbers to what had reported to
the FBI. And we found that there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the
FBI’s information.
HARI SREENIVASAN: You said that at least 550 police killings between 2007 and 2012 never made it onto the books?
ROB BARRY: Yeah, and that’s only among the top 105, 110 largest agencies in the country.
So there’s 18,000 jurisdictions. So you know, that’s just a small estimate of the total.
HARI SREENIVASAN:
OK, so for example, some jurisdictions could call something a
justifiable homicide versus an unjustifiable homicide? Discrepancies in
definitions? What do you mean?
ROB BARRY: Yes, it
was a wide range of things. That was certainly one of the issues there,
that what we’re dealing with here are essentially crime reports.
And
agencies who are forced to report information about unfortunate events
where officers take someone’s life. They don’t really want to include
that in a crime report.
It’s not a crime in their eyes. It was a justifiable event.
