We previously reported that Americans are 9 times more likely [4]to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.
But it turns out that our numbers were incorrect …
This isn’t surprising, given that [5]:
“Reliable estimates of the number of justifiable homicides committed by police officers in the United States do not exist.” A study of killings by police from 1999 to 2002 in the Central Florida region found that the national databases included (in Florida) only one-fourth of the number of persons killed by police as reported in the local news media.
The Guardian reports [6] today:
An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI [7] data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.
The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals [8] of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely [9] cited [10] in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.
As shown here [11], that means that you’re 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.