20 Years After Being Ordered To Tally Cop Shootings, The DOJ Still Isn't Compliant

Handguns: Designed To Kill (Or Seriously Injure) Human Beings

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"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/gun-cartoons-and-gun-violence.html

NRA Stopped CDC Research On Gun Violence

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/01/nra-stopped-cdc-research-on-gun-violence.html

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Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average census population for each race in 2003-09. "Other" includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.

The chart above isn't new. Mother Jones magazine created it two months ago. But it is worth keeping in mind amid the fall-out from the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown slaying.

In the accompanying story, Jaeah Lee writes:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims' race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.

• The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that's about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers' use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by "legal intervention" involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).

There's more below the fold.

But as Lee (and other reporters) have pointed out, these numbers, striking as they are, just aren't reliable. Together with some colleagues and help from criminologists, Richard Florida atThe Atlantic magazine's CityLab took a look in August at the available statistics and came up with an impressive set of maps showing the geography of police-related killings. Despite the prodigious effort, however, there are still holes in the data.

The reason? Here's Steve Straehley at AllGov.com:

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected.

And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that. The work of collecting the data was shuffled off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which made a few efforts at collecting data and put together a report in 2001, but has produced nothing since.

Those Justice Department figures above only cover 2003-2009. And even those are problematic because of the way that local police departments report or don't report statistics on police-involved shootings.

Blogger Jim Fisher has tried to crowdsource police-involved shootings, and he's had some luck. But, while his figures provide a more thorough count than the official sources, it's ridiculous that we still don't have a reliable, thorough, trustworthy, annual government report on police shootings, especially ones in which the people shot are killed.

It's impossible to look at the situation and not come to the conclusion that there are lots of people—police chiefs being prominent among them—who simply don't want people to know the extent of such shootings.

It's way past time that the Department of Justice do what Congress asked it to two decades ago.