Police Use of Deadly Force (Includes More than Just Fatalities)
Public interest in policing and the national dialogue surrounding the profession has increased since the summer of 2014 following several high-profile deadly force incidents (e.g., Michael Brown, Eric Garner). One of the most notable mainstream discoveries coming in the wake of Ferguson was the lack of reliable, national-level estimates of police use of lethal force. Reliable because “official” statistics on the number of citizens killed by police each year, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, miss about 50% of the total number of deaths. Much of the undercounting can be attributed to the fact that departmental reporting to the aforementioned federal agencies is voluntary and, therefore, subject to non-participation.
Seeing the deficiencies with the official statistics, a number of media outlets, such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, began independent data collection efforts - most starting in 2015 - to better measure deadly force, largely through the use of crowd sourcing and Internet searches. These media efforts have uncovered that American police fatally shoot approximately 1,000 people per year.
*Click on the links below to be directed to each data source:
1) The Washington Post’s database of fatal officer-involved shootings
2) The Guardian’s “The Counted”
However, they too suffer from their own set of limitations: only capturing incidents where citizens are killed. Police use of deadly force, by definition, is any physical force that is capable of or likely to kill, which includes all occasions where officers intentionally discharge their firearms; therefore, encounters where police officers shoot but only injure or miss entirely are still considered deadly force incidents, yet are not being counted as such by media outlets (see the figure below).
In other words, while the numbers from The Washington Post or The Guardian are more accurate in documenting those who die at the hands of police, they represent just the tip of the proverbial deadly force iceberg. Fortunately, there may be an alternative source of data in the form of state-based accountability systems, and seven states have moved forward in requiring law enforcement agencies to submit information on police shootings. In Texas, for example, police departments in the state must now (starting September 1, 2015) submit all instances where gunfire from an officer’s firearm injures or kills a citizen to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). California also started to require all law enforcement agencies in the state to report firearms discharges, regardless of civilian injury or death. Agencies in the state are mandated to furnish such information to the California Attorney General, which is then distributed for public consumption at the OpenJustice web portal. The Texas data represents an improvement over the media reports by incorporating injurious, non-fatal police shootings, while the California data include all cases where officers discharge their firearms – allowing for the examination of shots missing their intended targets, hitting/injuring, and those killing citizens.
*Click on the links below to be directed to each data source:
1) Texas
2) California
In an article in the Journal of Crime and Justice, I examined two full years – 2016 and 2017 – of Texas’ reporting system. There were 166 citizens who were either fatally shot or hit and injured by police gunfire in 2016. Of those 166, 77 people were killed (46%) and 89 were injured but survived their gunshot wounds (54%). Similarly in 2017, a total of 159 citizens were struck police gunfire: 81 of them fatally (51%) with another 78 only injured (49%). These figures, which indicate that more than one-half of those struck by police gunfire survive, highlight the inherently flawed and incomplete nature of the official data or media outlets that only report fatalities.
Additionally, the National Police Foundation, through its Police Data Initiative, has identified 36 law enforcement organizations who are taking steps to demonstrate increased transparency of officer-involved shooting data. This largely has taken the form of agency portals/ “open data” pages. These agencies include the Philadelphia Police Department, the Seattle Police Department, the Atlanta Police Department, the Cincinnati Police Department, the Louisville Metro Police Department, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Each department varies in the level of information provided.