Police Are Killing People At Twice The Reported Rate

Via: countercurrentnews.com

Many official reports noted a sharp rise in fatal police shootings over 2015. But the real figures are far more disturbing and staggering than what has been reported.

Official reports used by law enforcement in the United States have almost unanimously estimated police killings at several hundred (around 400 nationwide totally through the end of November).

That marks a huge increase over 2014.

But third party, independent studies estimate the real figure at more than twice that.

The Washington Post discovered that jut from January to May, there were 385 people killed by police. But that’s more than twice the reported rate by the FBI.

That’s because police reporting of these statistics is completely voluntary!

To show just how problematic that is, only 3% of the “nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies have reported fatal shootings by their officers to the FBI,” since 2011, according to PBS.

Jim Bueermann the president of the non-profit Police Foundation says, “Police shootings are grossly under-reported. We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information”.

As we reported at the close of the year, a grim tally was maintained this year by both the Guardian and the Washington Post, following the consistent failure of the U.S. government to keep adequate records.

According to the Guardian, 1,126 people were killed by police so far in 2015, averaging more than three a day, with 27 percent of those slain facing mental health issues.

The numbers confirm the racial injustices highlighted by nationwide protests. Among black people in America, 6.9 per million were killed by police, compared to 2.86 white people per million. In other words, African-Americans were nearly 2.5 times as likely to be killed by police as their white counterparts.

Native-Americans and Latinos were also disproportionately likely to have their lives taken by law enforcement, with 3.4 per million and 3.35 per million killed respectively.

The high number of killings was corroborated by the Washington Post, which only tracks fatal police shootings—not killings by taser, beating, and other forms of force, such as the high-profile death of African-American man Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The paper concluded, nonetheless, that nearly 1,000 civilians were shot and killed by police this year.

The Post‘s analysis found that the FBI, which is tasked with tracking such shootings, is dramatically undercounting killings because “fewer than half of the nation’s police departments report their incidents to the agency.”

“The Post documented well more than twice as many fatal shootings this year as the average annual tally reported by the FBI over the past decade,” journalists Kimberly Kindy, Marc Fisher, Julie Tate, and Jennifer Jenkins reported this week.

However, Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting’s watchdog journal Extra!, argued Tuesday that the Post also “held back” key information by downplaying the connection between the high number of police killings and the grievances issued by racial justice movements.

For example, Post journalists wrote that “the kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many U.S. communities—most often, white police officers killing unarmed black men—represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.”

The Post‘s numbers are damning…

“Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year,” the paper’s database found. “In the majority of cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white. But a hugely disproportionate number—3 in 5—of those killed after exhibiting less threatening behavior were black or Hispanic.”

Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, said in a statement last Monday: “I don’t want my child to have died for nothing and I refuse to let his legacy or his name be ignored. We will continue to fight for justice for him, and for all families who must live with the pain that we live with.”

(Article by M. David and S. Wooten)