How Many People Are Killed Each Year by the Police?
The truth is, no one knows. We can only estimate. The nation’s police departments are not technically required to report the total number of individuals killed by their officers to the government. The FBI only requests local departments volunteer the information but does not demand it.
The Bureau released its latest Uniform Crime Report earlier this month, reporting 461 people were killed in “justifiable homicides” in 2013. The US Justice Department similarly reports around 400 justifiable homicides annually. However, only about 750 of the nation’s 17,000 local police departments contribute data to these reports. That’s roughly 4 percent.
Numerous criminal justice experts therefore believe the government’s numbers on police-caused deaths are highly unreliable. Several independent tracking groups that monitor reports in online news articles estimate that police kills over 1,000 civilians annually.
One of these trackers, a Facebook page called “Killed by the Police” reports at least 1,002 people have been killed by US police this year. Noted statistician Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight has audited the page in order to insure the validity of the stories the group has cited.
While the numbers are unclear as to how many Americans are killed by police, the available data does indicate young Black men are at particular risk of dying at the hands of law enforcement.
21 Times More Likely to be Killed by Police
ProPublica, a non-profit news corporation, recently reported Black male teenagers are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white ones. This statistic was found by analyzing the 12,000 police shootings self-reported by departments from 2010 to 2012. Out of every one million White teenage men in America, about 1.5 were killed by police. For every one million Black teenage men, 31 were killed.
The risk of Blacks being killed by police is highest in America’s cities. In Oakland, California during the mid-2000s, a time when only around a third of the city’s population was Black, the NAACP reports 37 of 45 officer-involved shootings were of Black people. That’s over 80 percent.
Of the 8.2 million people living in New York City, just fewer than 25 percent are Black. But according to the 2011 NYPD Firearms Discharge Report, Blacks comprise 50 percent of all those fired upon by police.
Widespread profiling by police goes beyond just acts of violence, however. There were more stops of young Black men by the NYPD in 2011 than there were young Black men in the city.
It is no wonder given this information that African American by and large feel the justice system and police in particular discriminate against them.
Public Perceptions & Racial Injustice
A poll conducted by Gallup in 2012 following the trial of George Zimmerman indicated two-thirds of African Americans believed the US criminal justice system to be biased against Blacks. In contrast, just one quarter of Whites believed the system to be racially biased.
What the poll revealed was the greatest difference in opinion between Blacks and Whites on the matter since Gallup began gaging perceptions of bias in the early 90s.
Fast-forward two years later to the killing of Michael Brown. According to a recently released Huffington Post-YouGov poll, 62 percent of African Americans believe Officer Wilson was at fault in the shooting while only 22 percent of Whites think so. When Bill O’Reilly asked panelists on his show why Blacks continue to hold a mistrust of the justice system, Bob Beckel was quick to respond.
“In that town, 67 percent of them are Black. 93 percent of the stops in cars are of Black people,” Beckel explained. He argued to O’Reilly that repeated profiling and harassment on the part of the police has led African Americans in Ferguson and across the country to expect Officer Wilson to have treated Michael Brown harshly.
However, racial stereotypes also appear to cause the general public to expect certain behaviors from Blacks. In a study recently published by the American Psychological Association, Black boys as young as 10 are generally seen as less innocent as Whites. Black boys on average are seen as older and are more susceptible to police violence.
As UCLA Professor Phillip Atiba Goff put it, “Our research found that Black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when White boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”
Just this month in Cleveland, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black youth, was shot and killed by police while brandishing a BB gun in a city park. In the 911 call made by a man who saw the boy pointing his toy gun at people, he twice said the weapon was likely fake and the individual a juvenile.
Nonetheless, police shot Rice within seconds of arriving when the boy drew the BB gun into view. In calling for medical assistance for their shooting victim, the officers described the 12-year-old as appearing to be around 20.
What causes officers to act in such a way that appears to discriminate against African Americans and young Black men in particular? To try and answer this question, we must examine the very structure of America’s police departments themselves.
Police Brutality: A Deeper Understanding of the Issues 