{"id":18866,"date":"2016-11-18T15:47:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T20:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/how-many-people-are-killed-by-police\/"},"modified":"2016-11-18T15:47:47","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T20:47:47","slug":"how-many-people-are-killed-by-police","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/how-many-people-are-killed-by-police\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many People Are Killed by Police?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Incidents of police killing unarmed people of color have made national headlines, leading to the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement. The magnitude of these incidents have been heightened by pictures and videos shared on social media. Yet despite the public\u2019s interest in this topic, until recently little good data was available to study the prevalence of police violence in America. Over the past couple years there has been a renewed focus on data and technology that aims to educate, provide transparency, and even warn about potential police abuses in the United States.<\/p>\n

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The model that was supposed to establish a reporting program for data quantifying the occurrence of police violence against civilians was established in the 1990s. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (\u201cCrime Act\u201d) mandated that the Justice Department gather data about the \u201cuse of excessive force by law enforcement officers\u201d and include it in an annual report made public.[i]<\/a> The method in which the Justice Department was to collect data and the factors they would comprise, however, were not stated in the Crime Act.[ii]<\/a> Due to this ambiguity (and other political factors) this report has not been consistently issued.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

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One of the main problems in publishing this data is that the responsibility for collecting it is split among local departments. There are approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the country, most of which contain fewer than 25 officers.[iv]<\/a> Furthermore, to the extent a department does have the resources to report such data, there is no standard methodology or required inputs that the Justice Department requires. Factors such as the race of the victim, the circumstances in which an incident occurred, and the level of force are not always recorded.[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Non-governmental groups including media outlets in recent years have attempted to supplement this model by aggregating both public and private data on police violence:<\/p>\n

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www.mappingpoliceviolence.com<\/a> attempts to aggregate data from a variety of sources<\/em><\/p>\n

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