An article by Reuben Fischer-Baum points out that nobody can know, by looking at crime statistics in the U.S., exactly how many people are killed by the police each year. As surprising as that might seem, we especially do not know how many “unjustifiable” killings are committed by police each year. For all the data that the government collects, the estimate of 400 police killings per year is almost certainly incorrect.
But these estimates can be wrong. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.
Good writers use statistics to bolster their claims, but they also look critically at those numbers to be sure that the stats actually say what they seem to say.