Each year police kill a certain number of civilians. And every year the FBI puts out the Supplemental Homicide Report that's meant to provide an accurate count of those deaths. But it doesn't.
"I would rate it somewhere between awful and garbage-worthy," says David Klinger, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri and a retired cop, "It should be thrown out. People should not pay any mind to it."
It is so full of errors says Klinger, "I have described it as garbage, I have described it as a steaming pile of feces."
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.
[For more of this story, written by Sally Herships, go to http://www.marketplace.org/top...scarce-or-inaccurate]
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