Police Nationally Are Not Doing Their Jobs to Report Officer-Involved Homicides to FBI
The shooting deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown are among cases of police-involved homicides that have not been reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies, The Guardian reports. This is a cause for alarm as there continues to be a lack of documentation monitoring the growing issue of police shootings in America.
Of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, only 224 reported these shootings to the FBI in the last year. Because it is not mandatory to report these incidents, the data is inconsistent. “We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer said in an email to The Guardian.
Some flaws in the data collected between 2004 and 2014 show that no law enforcement agency from Florida has reported fatal officer-involved incidents. The NYPD has only submitted data for one year.
For many of the cases that sparked protests nationally, there was no data logged or it was entered incorrectly. This includes the deaths of Rekia Boyd, 22, who shot by a Chicago detective in March 2012; Tamir Rice, 12, who was killed by Cleveland police in Nov. 2014; and John Crawford, 22, who was killed by Beavercreek, Ohio, police in Aug. 2014.
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