WASHINGTON — Within 12 hours, two men were shot by DC police officers in two different quadrants of the city. One man, 27-year-old Antwan Gilmore, was shot and killed by police after being found asleep in his car.
It adds another name to an ever-growing list of Americans shot and killed by law enforcement. But, the exact length of that list is unknown.
A quick google search of 'how many police officers have fatally shot people' will bring up a different number depending on which link you're inclined to click.
D.C. Police releases a use-of-force report every year. But who is tracking these numbers in real time nationwide? Let's verify.
THE QUESTION
Who is tracking the amount of police officers who have shot and killed people?
THE SOURCES
- Dr. Philip Stinson, professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University and former law enforcement officer
- The FBI
THE ANSWER
The FBI has begun tracking these numbers, but their survey for law enforcement is entirely voluntary. Some non-governmental organizations attempt to track this but the numbers vary.
WHAT WE FOUND
In January of 2019, the FBI launched a nationwide data collection effort requesting law enforcement agencies to submit their use-of-force incident information. So far in 2021, just 35% of law enforcement agencies participated and provided use-of-force data. None of that incident data has been made public, an FBI spokesperson confirmed.
Participation in this effort is entirely voluntary. Broadly, law enforcement agencies are not required to aggregate, publish or submit use-of-force data to any central database. The same rules actually stand for the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program which is often a go-to for nationwide crime statistics.
Without compulsory data collection from the government, we're left with a lot of unknowns when it comes to how many people have been killed by police officers.
"You have to rely on their goodwill to submit the information to the federal government," Dr. Stinson explained. He also says the federal government hasn't gotten specific on this issue yet. "They really don't track this specific question about how many people are shot and killed by on duty police officers each year, that's still not a specific question that they're addressing and collecting data on."
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Dr. Stinson has been studying police crime since 2005. Since then, his research project has logged almost 20,000 cases of police officers around the country being arrested for various reasons. His research hinges on scraping the internet for publicly available information—he says law enforcement agencies don't just make that information accessible.
"We have to rely on crowdsourced data, frankly, open source data," he said. "I set up 48 Google Alerts back in 2005 that constantly crawled the Google News search engine. And those are the same 48 Google alerts that we rely on today in my research at Bowling Green to find cases."
Dr. Stinson worked with the Washington Post in late 2014 and early 2015 to start their own database of people who have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers. That project is still up and running today, being constantly updated, and is one of the only extensive lists with this kind of data.
The Post says they obtain all this data, including several details about each case, by "culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters."
MappingPoliceViolence.org and FatalEncounters.org use a similar strategy of combing police reports, news reports, social media posts and crowdsourced tips to build their databases. Mapping Police Violence tracks the number of people killed by police by more methods than guns, including chokeholds, tasters, etc. Fatal Encounters has a database of "non-police deaths that occur when police are present."
All three of these databases track different things and therefore report different rates of police killings. In 2020, The Washington Post counted 1,021 fatal police shootings; Mapping Police Violence counted 1,126 deaths at the hands of police. Our researchers could not find any numbers from any federal agency.
So we can verify there is no central, comprehensive and accessible database of fatal police shootings or any form of use-of-force. Many are attempting to create databases, but without comprehensive data reporting from law enforcement, the real totals may be impossible to attain.