salon | The shooting of teenager Michael Brown has focused the nation (again)
on the dangers faced by young, unarmed black men walking the streets of
America. The sight of paramilitary police with guns pointed at peaceful
protesters in a suburban town in the Midwest also got our attention.
And as we wait for the legal system to determine if officer Darren
Wilson will be held liable for the shooting, new questions are rising to
the surface about the issue of officer-involved shootings in general.
How often does this happen? How are these issues normally handled by
prosecutors and the courts? And surprisingly, there is almost no way of
knowing how often American citizens are killed at the hands of the
authorities.
Most reporting in the last couple of weeks has cited
the figure of 400 people killed in incidents of “justifiable homicide”
by police officers each year since 2008. This number comes from
estimates done by the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of
Justice Statistics. According to this article by
Reuben Fischer-Baum at Five Thirty Eight, that number is highly
debatable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that only
“justifiable” homicides are counted, which obviously means any that are
deemed unjustified are not. It’s clear that the current government
methods for reporting these deaths are unreliable.
Others have tried to compile these statistics themselves through media reports. Kyle Wagner at Deadspin recently announced a crowdsourcing project to
collect the information for a comprehensive database. D. Brian
Burghart, editor of the Reno News & Review, has been trying to
gather the data for years and wrote a very interesting, and disturbing, article for Gawker discussing the difficulties he’s had getting cooperation from the authorities:
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is
something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The
lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal
government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their
police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many
people it kills and why.
It’s the only conclusion that can be
drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this
information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only
trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public
records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data
annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it
doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law
enforcer can do.
It does seem more than a bit odd
that the government has the capacity to collect all emails and texts
that pass through the United States but is unable to compile a list of
citizens who died in interactions with police agencies, doesn’t it?
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