Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit, has tracked these killings by collecting reports from the media, public, and law enforcement and verifying them through news reports. Some of the data is incomplete, with details about a victim’s race, age, and other factors sometimes missing. It also includes killings that were potentially legally justified, and is likely missing some killings entirely. [...]
The map includes cases in which a police officer shot and killed someone. But some of the shootings — it’s hard to say how many — were “suicide by cop,” when people kill themselves by baiting a police officer into using deadly force. The map doesn’t include non-shooting deaths, such as vehicle crashes, stun guns, drug overdoses, and asphyxiations.
The FBI already collects some of this data from local and state agencies, but as Vox’s Dara Lind explained, that data is very limited. Reporting homicides for participating agencies is mandatory, but reporting the circumstances of homicides is not. So we might know that thousands of people die in a certain state, but we won’t always know why those homicides happened and whether they involved police. Participation in the FBI reporting programs is also voluntary, making the number of reported homicides in the federal data at best a minimum of what’s going on across the country.
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