FBI Director James Comey can’t conclusively say whether there is an “epidemic” of “biased police” killing black men, because no one has conclusive data on the subject.
Comey spoke to the International Association of Chiefs of Police at their annual conference in San Diego, Calif., on Sunday, where he explained that viral videos are merely anecdotes that are fueling a narrative that’s not based on evidence.
“Americans actually have no idea whether the number of black people, brown people or white people is up down or sideways,” Comey said, according to a transcript from the Washington Times. “They have no idea of these things because we have no idea of these things.”
One would think the FBI of all places would know how many citizens are killed each year by police, right? Turns out Comey is right.
Politifact had fact checked a 2014 claim from National Urban League CEO Marc Morial, who had said, “The number of killings of citizens by police is at a two-decade high.” Politifact labeled the claim as “half true,” but it probably should have gotten a “mostly false” rating since the data Morial used are basically useless.
Morial was referring to a 2014 USA Today article that used FBI data on “Justifiable homicide by law enforcement.” The problem here is that there’s no requirement for law enforcement to report officer-involved shootings, meaning the numbers from that 2014 article could be higher.
That would be scary, obviously, but as Politifact noted, there’s no way to tell what the trend line truly is because of this.
“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,” Politifact’s Steve Contorno* wrote. “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 previous years. Even less definitive conclusions can be drawn from comparing 2013 results to 1994.”
So we have no way of knowing exactly how many officer-involved shootings take place. Remember, those FBI statistics are just for “justifiable” shootings, so what about “unjustifiable” shootings? What law enforcement agency would admit to something being “unjustifiable”?
Since 2015, the Guardian has kept a running tally of the number of people killed by police in the U.S. In 2015, 1,146 people were killed by police (306 of them were black, 195 were Hispanic or Latino and 581 white). So far in 2016, police have killed 856 people, including 415 whites, 204 blacks and 135 Hispanics or Latinos.
This tally from the Guardian might be the best data we have, and the paper includes a brief summary of how each person was killed. Some shootings might be too ambiguous to know for certain whether the police were involved in a “justifiable” shooting, however.
The FBI has also recently announced it would try to collect use-of-force data to better understand whether there is an actual epidemic and how the tragic and unjustified shootings can be stopped.
The continued release of videos without context — and the media’s constant deception on the issue in order to create a political narrative — will continue to cause violent unrest as people are led to believe there is an epidemic that might not exist.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
