The Mendoza Line

By David Mendoza - Monday, December 15, 2014

Earlier this month, Rob Barry and Coulter Jones of the Wall Street Journal reported that large discrepancies exist between the number of police killings recorded by police agencies and the number of killings reported to the FBI. Between 2007 and 2012, Barry and Jones discovered that 105 of the largest police agencies in America recorded a total of 1,822 police killings, but reported less than 68% of those deaths to the FBI. These results lead the authors to the grim conclusion that “it is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.” In the wake of several deadly police shootings this year, numerous publications have arrived at the same appalling conclusion.

Police agencies have a variety of explanations for why these inconsistencies occur. Several agencies like the Fairfax County Police Department just decide not to report any police killings to the FBI, which the federal government doesn’t actually require them to do. Fairfax County defended its decision by telling the Journal that it didn’t believe justifiable police killings were an “actual offense” that should be reported. In other cases, inadequate or outdated technology prevents all agencies in Florida and New York and most agencies in Illinois from reporting any data.

However, among agencies that do report police killings, some of the discrepancies shown in the chart above can be explained by the fact that police killings are reported by the agency where the death occurred. For example, as the Journal noted, “the California Highway Patrol said there were 16 instances in which one of its officers killed someone in a city or other local jurisdiction responsible for reporting the death to the FBI.” This reveals why it only reported 3 — or 16% — of the 19 police killings it recorded in 2012. In other instances, this also explains why other agencies reported more killings than their officers committed. Pennsylvania State Police were only responsible for 16 of the 30 killings it reported to the FBI between 2007 and 2012. The other 14 were committed by outside agencies, according to the Journal.

Regardless of the source of the irregularities in the FBI’s data, it demonstrates why we need a law that mandates police agencies to report all police killings it commits each year. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with this flawed and inaccurate measure, leaving us perpetually in the dark about this important trend.

Update: I’d like to thank Hayley Munguia at FiveThirtyEight for featuring my post on this week’s Ctrl + ← recap.