Unarmed People Killed by Police: Who's Counting?

It has been reported today by the Associated Press that U.S. Police Fatalities Have Risen 13% in 2011.

Across the nation, 173 officers died in the line of duty, up 13 percent from 153 the year before, according to numbers as of Wednesday compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

This is, of course, disturbing news, but what is not news and even more disturbing is that no one even seems interested in keeping track of how many unarmed people were killed by police officers in the same year.

Aware of this problem, and having attempted in the past to find something on the internet that might serve as even close to accurate information as to how many unarmed people have been shot and killed by police, and failed, after reading this article I tried again to find any reliable source that might give a number as to how many unarmed people were killed by police.

I first Googled this question: How many unarmed suspects were killed by U.S. police officers in 2011. The first article on that page was a Wikipedia article Death of Jean Charles Menezes which is about London police officers misidentifying someone and shooting him in the head. If this is foreshadowing for all to come it is disturbing foreshadowing to be sure. Why would an article about London police killing an unarmed and innocent be the first article to come up on a question of U.S. police killing people?

The second article on that same page was yet another Wikipedia article, and astoundingly, another article about police use of firearms in the United Kingdom. The third article on that Google page is a tad better, which is an article which is a pro gun website listing the unarmed people killed by Las Vegas officers with AR15's. This is that link. The next link is an article about the second unarmed person being killed by Downey police officers in the same month (October 2011), the fifth link is a Huffington Post article about Downey (again) police killing yet another unarmed man this December, the fifth link from the Downey Patriot, (again with Downey) is a fairly non-specific article about another unarmed man shot and killed by Downey police, the sixth link is a New York Times article about Sean Bell, who was an unarmed victim of New York police and their guns, but this happened in 2007.

The final three links of that Google page are this (another Las Vegas incident) this, which claims that 1 in 3 people killed by Huston police officers were unarmed, and finally this link which is an article about yet another unarmed man killed by Las Vegas police.

Relatively certain that this Google search would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, I tried again, this time asking this question: "who tracks the number of people killed by u.s. police officers"? The first link, and astoundingly so, is the lyrics to Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant. The second link, a CNBC article is not much more help in the search for a reliable number of unarmed people killed by police, and is instead titled: "America's Most Destructive Riots of all Time. The third link appears to be a personal blog (dated 1992) of one mans effort to categorize unarmed people being killed by police through collected news clippings. It gets closer to what the search was looking for, but is not a comprehensive study attempting to get at the actual numbers of unarmed people shot and killed by police. The fourth link is about the Mexican Drug war and I am not clear why it is even on this Google page, but it is. The fifth article is a web site called The Police Policy Studies Council and is actually the type of reliable study I was hoping to find, only this one is specific to Portland Oregon only.

The sixth link of this Google search, however, veers off into some rant written by a police officer lamenting Body Counts now infamous "Cop Killer" song. However, the next link helps to put all this in perspective:

When the Police Shoot, Who's Counting?

WE like to think we live in the information age, when daily or even second-by-second statistics on such fare as stock prices and the annual number of homicides are at our fingertips. For all the careful accounting, however, there are two figures Americans don't have: the precise number of people killed by the police, and the number of times police use excessive force.

Despite widespread public interest and a provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the Attorney General to collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the cooperation of local police departments. No comprehensive accounting for all of the nation's 17,000 police department exists.

Later in that article it is pointed out that:

The International Chiefs of Police, a police organization, tried in the 1980's to collect such information, but "the figures were very embarrassing to a lot of police departments," said James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who is a former New York City police lieutenant. The results, he said, varied wildly. New Orleans had 10 times as many shootings per 100 officers as Newark. Long Beach had twice as many as neighboring Los Angeles, which in turn had three times more than New York.

Some cities did not provide data at all, Professor Fyfe said, but the results, such as they were, showed that "the rates of deadly force are all over the lot," meaning that some cities appear to be much better and some much worse at managing their police forces.

Who's watching the watchmen?

I know of 2 in the last couple of months here in Atlanta.

Both 19, both unarmed, both fathers, both running, both shot in the back...

Originally posted by My.mind.is.mine
I know of 2 in the last couple of months here in Atlanta.

Both 19, both unarmed, both fathers, both running, both shot in the back...

Can you provide a link for these stories?

reply to post by greeneyedleo


Here's the first. Lemme grab the second.


union city police killing

Here's another (sorry, the stories are apparently not important enough to be easy to find)

Vine City police killing

Activists allege favela residents receive worse treatment from the Rio police, who killed one person for every 23 they arrested in 2008 – compared with one for every 37,000 in the US, according to Human Rights Watch. .

Story on Rio police clearing slums

Apprently somone keeps track. It's always interesting to see the stats. I knew Rio had issues but I almost choked on that ratio. Wow.... Talk about a real bad place to protest or do much of anything for a cop to notice. The U.S. seems downright warm and fuzzy compared to some places. How scary is that?


That link seems a little odd about loading. The story is also center column, about mid-range on Drudge at the moment and that links straight in with no problems. Sorry if they are odd about links.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Are you intentionally trying to steer attention away from what this topic is about?

Are you seriously comparing the situation in the favelas to the US?

I've been calling for attention to this since the US war mongers like to point out how other countries are so bad they need invading. Thanks OP.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


Great thread Jean...........

A little older information,but the site is a plethora of information,none the less.....

From January 2010 through December 2010 the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project recorded 4,861 unique reports of police misconduct that involved 6,613 sworn law enforcement officers and 6,826 alleged victims. 4,861 – Unique reports of police misconduct tracked 6,613 - Number of sworn law enforcement officers involved (354 were agency leaders such as chiefs or sheriffs) 6,826 - Number of alleged victims involved 247 – Number of fatalities associated with tracked reports $346,512,800 – Estimated amount spent on misconduct-related civil judgments and settlements excluding sealed settlements, court costs, and attorney fees.

2010 NPMSRP Police Misconduct Statistical Report -Draft-

Or stories like this.......

Phoenix AZ police have been implicated in video for participating in the death of a man in jail despite their apparent attempts to distance themselves from the incident by claiming the altercation that cost the man’s life happened after they transferred custody over to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Dept. This was alleged by a police lieutenant from a different agency who is running for Maricopa County Sheriff in an op-ed he wrote after reviewing the video, shown above. In that video an officer alleged to be a Phoenix PD cop puts the victim in a choke hold without any apparent threat from that victim, at least not any physically visible threat.

injusticeeverywhere


Again,LEO's jobs are to protect and serve. Change the laws,and Police will have to be held to higher standards,and rightfully so. Stay safe,everyone,LEO's included.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000

Activists allege favela residents receive worse treatment from the Rio police, who killed one person for every 23 they arrested in 2008 – compared with one for every 37,000 in the US, according to Human Rights Watch. .

Story on Rio police clearing slums

Apprently somone keeps track. It's always interesting to see the stats. I knew Rio had issues but I almost choked on that ratio. Wow.... Talk about a real bad place to protest or do much of anything for a cop to notice. The U.S. seems downright warm and fuzzy compared to some places. How scary is that?

That link seems a little odd about loading. The story is also center column, about mid-range on Drudge at the moment and that links straight in with no problems. Sorry if they are odd about links.

edit on 28-12-2011 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

I realize you have all ready acknowledged the hinky situation with the link you provided, but I just went into the Human Rights Watch site itself and in their search engine typed in U.S. police killing unarmed people. The result was 17 pages of articles, not all having anything at all to do with the U.S. police killing unarmed U.S. people. The first page had 30 articles to sift through and the closest one on that page was this, which is a letter written to then U.S. Attorney Ashcroft urging him to investigate police impropriety.

I will, as time permits, continue to peruse that site to find this number you posted and any meaningful study that might give us a clearer picture as to how many unarmed people are killed by police.

Thanks for your input.

reply to post by sonnny1


Thank you, Brother, for that information. Upon reading that report you linked it occurred to me that I was probably not being too scientific in searching for a reliable report on police shooting unarmed people in 2011, given 2011 isn't even over yet. Hindsight suggests I should have searched for the year 2010 or earlier. I will do this tomorrow when I get a chance.

Originally posted by InfoKartel
reply to post by Wrabbit2000

 

Are you intentionally trying to steer attention away from what this topic is about?

Are you seriously comparing the situation in the favelas to the US?

I've been calling for attention to this since the US war mongers like to point out how other countries are so bad they need invading. Thanks OP.

Not at all. It was, however, something I had just read within an hour or so of reading this one and it contained the ratio, seemingly, to the letter of what people were curious about for American police suspect fatalities. The other aspect put a little context to where and why the numbers had come up and actually been in print somewhere else within the last 24 hours.

Interesting timing...but it was offered for the American law enforcement in-custody fatalities. I.E....What the Headline asked as a direct question.

one in thirty seven thousand....

thats a lot of arrests....
you can't provide much grist for the mill when you are dead...
but they need the threat that you might become so....

Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country's 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. "There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future," said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.'s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.

online.wsj.com...

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

My apologies if the source I linked to after following that link via Drudge turns out to have quoted non-existent data in a specific database like that. Err.... It seemed to have been valid enough and wouldn't strike me as being made up..particularly in the context I'd found it in. Oh well... my bad if that is what happened.

oooosp missed the questionable quoted number
heres a number from britian for the last 11 years

Deaths in police custody since 1998: 333; officers convicted: none
IPCC study finds failure in care of vulnerable prisoners – and says juries are unwilling to convict police officers

www.guardian.co.uk...

ah here we go 40 MILLION ARRESTS over three years.
haha, and I thought thirty seven thousand might have been a bit errrmmm High.
high as in police altered state

Study: 2,002 died in police custody over 3 years
— More than 2,000 criminal suspects died in police custody over a three-year period, half of them killed by officers as they scuffled or attempted to flee, the government said Thursday.

The study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics is the first nationwide compilation of the reasons behind arrest-related deaths in the wake of high-profile police assaults or killings involving Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo in New York in the late 1990s.

The review found 55 percent of the 2,002 arrest-related deaths from 2003 through 2005 were due to homicide by state and local law enforcement officers. Alcohol and drug intoxication caused 13 percent of the deaths, followed by suicides at 12 percent, accidental injury at 7 percent and illness or natural causes at 6 percent. The causes for the deaths of the remaining 7 percent were unknown.

The highly populated states of California, Texas and Florida led the pack for both police killings and overall arrest-related deaths. Georgia, Maryland and Montana were not included in the study because they did not submit data.

Investigator: These are unusual cases
The study finds that 77 percent of those who died in custody were men between the ages of 18 and 44. Approximately 44 percent were white; 32 percent black; and 20 percent Hispanic.

“Keep in mind we have 2,000 deaths out of almost 40 million arrests over three years, so that tells you by their nature they are very unusual cases,” said Christopher J. Mumola, who wrote the study

www.msnbc.msn.com...

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Then I suspect the creators of the information you found have a not-so-savoury agenda. Which researcher in their right minds would compare the favelas to the US? Unless they were trying to lull people into a false sense of security...

I mean...the favelas...the police routinely charge in with entire swat teams, routinely enter in firefights with drug cartels with many, many victims on the police force, in the drug cartels and innocents in the streets. It's gang warfare like nowhere else. So a really poor choice for comparison, unless of course, an agenda was in play.

agenda?
the prison system slash police state in the US is a growth industry and a political tool
unless it isn't seen for what it is, then its called "law and order"

law and order gives "value added" to things...
like drugs, DOJ sold automatic weapons, and prison beds...

those who trade freedom for security will have neither...
what you will get is Eric Holder.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

 

My apologies if the source I linked to after following that link via Drudge turns out to have quoted non-existent data in a specific database like that. Err.... It seemed to have been valid enough and wouldn't strike me as being made up..particularly in the context I'd found it in. Oh well... my bad if that is what happened.

I wouldn't know if it was non existent data or not since that link insisted I register to the site in order to read what you linked. I suppose it is an easy enough thing to do to register to a site, but I didn't want to do that, so I went straight to the source. If Human Rights Watch has this data you provided then it is in their site somewhere. I will keep looking as time permits, but even if I were to register to that link you provided I suppose the proper thing to do would be to go to the source directly.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

Indeed... That is a problem and I likely won't link or use them again for anything for that reason. It seemed workable at the time because I hadn't tried loading the link directly on a line by itself. It had been a linked story through drudge and from that it didn't ask for login. I'd gone back and added an edit to my first post noting the link issue..but too late by then.

I have posted this on a another thread that was similar to this one but had different context. I am posting it here because it applies to both.


After the American people saw what the Arab Spring went through in totalitarian dictatorships and then saw that what Occupy Wall Street went through in a country that is suppose to be free and there was almost no difference, this is what happened.

www.cnn.com...


You can blame this directly on the Federal Government and the DOJ who have violated the Constitution just by not upholding it let alone what the Politicians have done. The politicians have circumvented the checks and balances that keep this country free, the Police followed. I am still not sure if most Police are really this stupid, or if they are trying to "take the side they think is going to win" but this is what is happening

www.cnn.com...

and I am going to tell you what. If you are a Cop, I suggest you better back the F off everyone and go back to serving and protecting and upholding the constitution because if you don't, then I suggest you plan on going to work every day knowing that people will defend the Constitution with their life, or yours if you violate it. And guess why? Because you have given most of them no choice.

When I start to see Police arresting Politicians, Corporate CEO's and their own corrupt Police force I will have faith in the justice system again. Until then, I will not be one to shoot a cop, but sure as f*ck don't expect me to have an ounce of sympathy for you. You made your bed, now lay in it.

here's your problem:
"dumbing down."

Police May Scrap Entrance Exam: Report

www.nbcchicago.com...

to some folks an after dinner constitootional don't mean crap

we aren't talking about them here.

This story says that the average I.Q. for a cop is 104, if that is accurate it means there are thousands of police with I.Q.’s in the 80-100 range. Is it any surprise then that incidents of police brutality and abuses upon citizens (as well as the Constitution) are now so frequent?
Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took an exam to join the New London police, in Connecticut, in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125.

But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

nyletterpress.wordpress.com...

There recently appeared a chart that indicated an average intelligence quote per state that claims the states with people of lower average IQ chose Bush. The states with higher average IQs leaned toward Kerry. It claimed that the average IQ in America is 98, far lower than I realized.

perdurabo10.tripod.com...


old enough to know better and dumb enough to try anyway...

One is too many.

I'm an unabashed LEO supporter, because there are far more (in the 10,000 to 1 numbers) good officers than there are bad ones. But the bad ones are really, really bad. They need to be weeded out, rounded up, and publicly stoned. They have betrayed the trust of a citizenry that depends upon them for protection, and that is an egregious offense to humanity.

/TOA