“The number of killings of citizens by police is at a two-decade high.”
National Urban League CEO Marc Morial during an appearance Nov. 30 on “Fox News Sunday”
The shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson has sparked national dialogues ranging from the racial makeup of police forces to the militarization of local law enforcement.
Another issue up for debate is the use of deadly force by police. On this topic, we heard a noteworthy statistic from National Urban League CEO Marc Morial during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”: “The number of killings of citizens by police is at a two-decade high.”
The stat caught our attention, but is it accurate?
At first blush, it looked like Morial is on solid ground. He has two good sources for his claim: USA Today and the FBI. But as we dug deeper, we discovered sizable shortcomings in the data.
A National Urban League spokeswoman pointed us to the USA Today story. The headline: “Police killings highest in two decades.”
USA Today reviewed data collected by the FBI for its annual Uniformed Crime Report and a statistic called “justifiable homicide by law enforcement.”
We looked at the statistics ourselves. In 2013, the latest year on record, there were 458 justifiable homicides involving a firearm. The last time it was higher was in 1994, when 460 were reported.
This would seem to make it a cut-and-dried case. But as we learned from experts in crime statistics and police-involved shootings, there are significant holes in the FBI data that cast doubts on whether real conclusions can be drawn from the statistics.
The USA Today story and other news outlets noted the limitations of the FBI statistics as well.
The problem: There is no mandate that local law enforcement agencies report officer involved shootings to the FBI. While 18,000 city, university, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily participate in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, just a fraction of them willingly provide data on deadly force and justifiable homicides within their departments.
Robert Worden, a professor at the University of Albany School of Criminal Justice, said “the actual number of such homicides may be as high as double the FBI’s counts.”
“(Morial’s) claim might be true, but it’s impossible to say with confidence,” Worden said. “The consensus among experts is that these data are unsatisfactory, leaving questions about the number of people shot and killed by police in any year and trends in that number over time completely open.”
David Klinger, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said there is no reason to believe the number of agencies that do report are representative of the population, and the number who report may fluctuate from year to year. It’s entirely possible that the reason the number went up from 2012 to 2013 is simply because more police agencies reported their officer-involved shootings than in prior years.
“I wish people would just admit that the data sucks and they shouldn’t be using it for anything other than to say that’s the baseline number of people who have been reported to be killed by the police in a given year,” Klinger said.
Are there any other sources for the data? Not really. James McGinty, a spokesman for the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank focused on best practices for law enforcement, said there’s no data that’s conclusive, even for determining basic trend lines.
“We certainly think there should be better data on this,” McGinty said.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics used to track the number of deaths while in police custody, a similar but imperfect number. The data, however, only go from 2003 to 2009 and do not appear to have been updated.
Lorie Fridell, a professor at the University of South Florida department of criminology, surveyed most local law enforcement agencies in the country and found the vast majority track the number of officer-involved shootings internally. But there is no national clearinghouse for the data, and mandating reporting to the federal level would be a challenge.
“Individual researchers sometimes collect this information from multiple departments, but even those latter efforts do not come close to providing us with reliable national data,” Fridell said.
Our ruling
Morial said “the number of killings of citizens by police is at a two-decade high.”
He was quoting a USA Today analysis based on FBI statistics. In that sense, Morial seemed to have good sources. But digging deeper showed the information is hardly reliable.
Only a fraction of law enforcement agencies provide this data to the FBI, and the number of agencies reporting changes every year. These problems are not new and were in fact noted in the USA Today story Morial referenced.
Normally we would put more stock in FBI statistics. But in this case there are many known problems with the data. We rate the claim Half True.
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