FBI Will Finally Start Keeping Track of How Citizens Are Killed by Police

Over the past two years, law enforcement in America has been increasingly criticized for their application of the use of force. Most notably, it’s come to light that our police officers kill far more people than the official numbers show. According to the FBI, there were between 397 and 461 “justifiable homicides” by the police every year, between 2009 and 2013.

However, these numbers are gathered by police departments on a voluntary basis, and are very misleading. They also don’t say much more than how many people died. On the other hand, the numbers gathered by citizen watchdog groups, and newspapers like The Guardian and The Washington Post, suggest that the real number of people killed by police is around a thousand per year. Due to this well publicized scrutiny, the FBI has been forced to revise their method of data collection.

The Guardian reports that the FBI is launching a new program to count these deaths, which will be similar to how the paper collects their data. Stephen Fischer, a member of the FBI’s criminal justice information services division, told The Guardian that the agency had “identified a need for more robust and complete information about encounters between law enforcement officers and citizens that result in a use of force”. The Director of the FBI admitted in October that it is “ridiculous and embarrassing” that citizen groups and newspapers know more about these deaths than the government does.

While police departments still don’t have to report their justifiable homicides, the new system will publish a wider range of data, including the way these suspects were killed, such as by physical force, taser, blunt weapons, and firearms. Also included, will be the age, sex, and race of both the officer and the suspect. And finally, they will include how the encounter occurred, and what relationship the officer and the suspect had before he or she was killed. The new data is expected to be released in 2016.