Researcher Seeks help Compiling Police Shooting List (Picture)

The United States has no database of police shootings. There is no standardized process by which officers log when they’ve discharged their weapons and why. There is no central infrastructure for handling that information and making it public. Researchers, confronted with the reality that there are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, aren’t even sure how you’d go about setting one up. No one is keeping track of how many American citizens are shot by their police. This is crazy. This is governmental malpractice on a national scale. We’d like your help in changing this.

Unless you’re jaded and cynical like me, you’d probably find it impossible to believe that in the whole of the US that there is no nationwide database detailing cop-related shootings resulting in citizens being wounded or killed. Law enforcement would like to have the general public believe that they have the most dangerous job in the country, and they keep meticulous records of how many police officers are killed or wounded in the line of duty, yet there is no statistics on how many people are killed or wounded by police officers yearly. This isn’t a cop bashing thread. Many shootings are justified, but why can’t they disclose those statistics?

I think this is a pretty awesome project started by Kyle Wagner, awesome in that it’s such a big task and awesome for the public’s right to know. Who knows, it may be a bad thing to get people all riled up, but how to effect change when there aren’t any solid facts to go by. It may actually prove that policing America is truly dangerous and the latitudes given to law enforcement are completely justified with only a few bad apples spoiling the bunch.

Here’s another article by D. Brian Burghart, who has been collecting data for two years on police killings. He says it’s no easy task to get this kind of information. He is also creating a nationwide database on police shootings.

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The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this project is something I’ll never be able to prove, but I’m convinced to my core: The lack of such a database is intentional. No government—not the federal government, and not the thousands of municipalities that give their police forces license to use deadly force—wants you to know how many people it kills and why.

It’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. What evidence? In attempting to collect this information, I was lied to and delayed by the FBI, even when I was only trying to find out the addresses of police departments to make public records requests. The government collects millions of bits of data annually about law enforcement in its Uniform Crime Report, but it doesn’t collect information about the most consequential act a law enforcer can do.

Not surprising. It’s a pretty good article and his website has good info too. Crowdsourcing data to help this along is a pretty noble idea, at least until it gets shut down. Although his submissions process seems a little more confusing than Kyle Wagner’s, he is actually going back and fact checking to make it wholly official.

Both articles have many good links and good comments.

Here’s a sample of Wagner’s submissions form. At the initial link he sets out the guidelines, so once it’s all said and done, it should be an accurate and professional accounting.  MOREHERE