Repeater
Regular Member
Such irony. Background checks for gun transfers. Sure, the police likes that. But reporting incidents where officers kill people? Apparently, not so much. Including D.C. and Fairfax County:
Hundreds of Police Killings Are Uncounted in Federal Stats
You can subvert their paywall by going through google first.
Here's a thought: maybe the General Assembly should force all police departments in the Commonwealth to upload all data to the FBI -- or lose funding.
Hundreds of Police Killings Are Uncounted in Federal Stats
You can subvert their paywall by going through google first.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105 of the country’s largest police agencies found more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.
...
The reports to the FBI are part of its uniform crime reporting program. Local law-enforcement agencies aren’t required to participate. Some localities turn over crime statistics, but not detailed records describing each homicide, which is the only way particular kinds of killings, including those by police, are tracked by the FBI. The records, which are supposed to document every homicide, are sent from local police agencies to state reporting bodies, which forward the data to the FBI.
...
Justifiable police homicides from 35 of the 105 large agencies contacted by the Journal didn’t appear in the FBI records at all. Some agencies said they didn’t view justifiable homicides by law-enforcement officers as events that should be reported. The Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia, for example, said it didn’t consider such cases to be an “actual offense,” and thus doesn’t report them to the FBI.
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Police in Washington, D.C., didn’t report to the FBI details about any homicides for an entire decade beginning with 1998—the year the Washington Post found the city had one of the highest rates of officer-involved killings in the country. ... D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she doesn’t know why the agency stopped reporting the numbers in 1998. “I wasn’t the chief and had no role in decision making” back then, said Ms. Lanier, who was a captain at the time. When she took over in 2007, she said, reporting the statistics “was a nightmare and a very tedious process.”
Here's a thought: maybe the General Assembly should force all police departments in the Commonwealth to upload all data to the FBI -- or lose funding.