US government undercounted police killings by half: Study

Demonstrators confront police while protesting the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley on September 16, 2017 in St. Louis, Missouri. (Getty Images)

US police killed 1,166 people in 2015, more than three a day, but an official US government count misclassified over half of the deaths, according to a new study.

More than half of all police killings in 2015 were incorrectly classified as not having been police-related, a Harvard study based on data by The Guardian has found.

The Guardian, a British daily newspaper and media company with US and international editions, counted 93 percent of the police-related deaths, while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted only 45 percent.

"It is kind of absurd that a British newspaper is able to do a better job counting the number of killings by police than the CDC or the Department of Justice," said lead author Justin Feldman, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

“Right now the data quality is bad and unacceptable,” Feldman said. “To effectively address the problem of law enforcement-related deaths, the public needs better data about who is being killed, where, and under what circumstances.”

"If we as a society want to improve policing and have fewer deaths, we need better data about the circumstances of these deaths to improve training, policies and to hold police departments accountable," he said in a phone interview with the UK newspaper.

Feldman used data from The Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS).

The CDC, which based its count on state death certificates, has long been suspected of significant underreporting. The Guardian, which stopped counting in 2016, used crowd-sourced information and news stories.

Harvard researchers estimated that The Guardian missed 80 of the approximately 1,166 deaths and the CDC missed a majority of them -- 643 police killings.

Deaths of blacks, children and people in low-income counties were more likely to be missed than to be reported in the federal government count.

Some US states failed to report to the CDC any of the deaths at the hands of police. In Oklahoma, police killed 30 civilians in 2015, but none of those deaths was included in the official government count, Feldman said.

Feldman proposed that states be required to report police-related deaths, like they’re now required to report some communicable diseases. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) does not require US law-enforcement agencies to report civilians killed in police interactions.

“There is mounting pressure to increase law-enforcement transparency and accountability. One necessary component to that is having an accurate count of the number of people killed by police,” said Cassandra Crifasi, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.

US police departments have been under heightened scrutiny in recent years for the disproportionate number of police killings of African Americans.

Numerous demonstrations have been held across the US in recent years following white police officers killing unarmed African-American men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.