Black people killed by black cops?

August 20, 2014 9:55 AM

Where can I find statistics of black officers who have used lethal force against black people.
posted by CollectiveMind to Law & Government (4 answers total)

I don't think this will be possible, because the United States has no database of police shootings. There is no standardized process by which officers log when they've discharged their weapons and why. There is no central infrastructure for handling that information and making it public.
posted by mcstayinskool at 10:11 AM on August 20, 2014 [3 favorites]

Here's the NYC discharge report

..which I was just browsing because it was linked off this page
posted by vacapinta at 10:16 AM on August 20, 2014

Fivethirtyeight just did a feature on the difficulty of compiling accurate police homicide statistics: Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year. It's a sobering read. The main problems are:

• Fewer local police agencies report [FBI Supplemental Homicide Report data, which contains information on victims and offenders] than report standard [Uniform Crime Reporting data, which does not].
• “Felon killed by police” refers narrowly to justifiable police homicides, and “unjustifiable homicide by police” is not a classification. This means it’s difficult to combine unjustifiable police homicides — which could be listed as crimes elsewhere in the database — with “justifiable” police homicides.
• If the legality of a police homicide is in question, it may not be reported to the FBI SHR until the investigation is resolved. If the investigation concludes in a new reporting year, the old SHR data may not be updated, regardless of whether the killing was found to be justifiable or not. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert of the University of South Carolina, an expert on police violence, said he has “never seen a department go back and audit their numbers and fix them.” (In a statement provided in response to emailed questions, the FBI confirmed that it generally does not reopen master data files to add or correct reports.)
• Killings in federal jurisdictions, such as federal prisons or military bases, are not included in the database.

The FBI's Supplemental Homicide Report does track the race of victim and offender, so it seems that if you really want to, it is possible to do this for deaths that are in the SHR, and classified as "felon killed by police".
posted by zamboni at 10:17 AM on August 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

I thought this was a pretty interesting article.
posted by TheLibrarian at 10:39 AM on August 20, 2014 [1 favorite]