In police killings, numbers are scarce or inaccurate
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Three different government agencies have tried to get at the numbers. The Centers for Disease Control puts out a report, and there’s the FBI’s Justifiable Homicide Report. And, until March 2014 when it suspended data collection, the Bureau of Justice Statistics put out a report on arrest-related deaths.
Check the data collected by the FBI and you’ll see that in 2013, 461 civilians were killed by police. But the data may be off. That’s because the information comes from local police agencies that aren’t required to send their data to the FBI, so some police departments don’t send data at all. Klinger notes that some agencies say justifiable homicides shouldn’t be treated as crimes.
“I have heard some police agencies say ‘We’re not going to report this to the FBI because there’s no crime involved,'” Klinger says.
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