[9/7/16] To famed and celebrated American author Mark Twain, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. After all, facts are facts, and that’s all we need to rely on. Everything else is panis et circenses.
The notion that public policing has failed us is a fact — not a statistic. But looking at the numbers may help us attain a better understanding of where they have failed and what led these institutions to pursue policies that not only incentivize crime but also create it out of thin air — so much so that police officers are at the top of the list of threats the common American faces today.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, most homicides involve fewer than three victims. About three-quarters of all homicide victims are murdered by someone they know. But among those victims of homicide who aren’t familiar with the murderer, at least one third are killed by law enforcement, reports Granta, citing an analysis published by the Human Rights Data Analysis group.
Multiple incidents of police brutality have made the rounds in the media and people have taken to the streets to protest. Amid the outcry, the public was made aware that police departments often lack detailed information when it comes to the number of people killed at the hands of U.S. officers.
According to FastCompany.com, “[w]hen it comes to overall crime, there is a wealth of data available to law enforcement, governments, and researchers through the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, … But the UCR is very crucially defunct in one metric: the number of incidents of homicide by law enforcement.”
The problem is that the government’s own database fails to include all deaths. Instead, it only reports the numbers of killings by police in what law enforcement considers to be justified. The collected data also includes the weapons used, but “non-justified police-induced deaths, … [or] all the deaths by police that [weren’t] deemed ‘justified’” are left out.
FastCompany.com also adds that “out of the 17,000 law-enforcement agencies in the United States, only 750, or 4.4% of them, submitted death-by-police data to the FBI in the most recent year available.”
According to MappingPoliceViolence.org, one of the organizations created out of the need to track and catalog these underreported deaths, police killed 1,152 people in the United States between January and December 2015.
To the author of Granta’s Violence in Blue, who has been documenting “mass killings by state agents in over thirty countries around the world,”the rates of deaths may vary from country to country, but what most have in common is the fact that “the data [they] are able to collect is always partial,” meaning that law enforcement organizations run by governments across the globe — including America’s — have a hard time keeping accurate data of killings committed by police officers. Why? According to Patrick Ball, “[v]ictims are afraid of retaliation and so they explain the deaths in other ways.” With governments playing hardball when it comes to tracking and disclosing these numbers, the lack of victims stepping forward makes it difficult for independent researchers do their job.
Ball adds that “state agents who commit mass violence make every effort to disguise their actions.”
He explains…CONTINUE READING