I. Introduction

Since the protests this past August in Ferguson, increasing attention has been drawn to the number of deaths that happen every year at the hands of our civilian police forces. In short order it became conventional wisdom that Nobody Knows How Many Americans the Police Kill Each Year, Hundreds of Police Killings are Uncounted in Federal Stats, and even the Attorney General acknowledged that We Need Better Data on Police Shootings and Officer Deaths. Yesterday’s interim report from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing echoed these same sentiments.

Seeking to fill this data gap have been a number of citizen-led online initiatives (before and after the murder of Michael Brown) to capture every police killing of a civilian and/or death during the process of arrest—and notable among those efforts is the website KilledbyPolice.net, which maintains a database of individuals killed by the police, tracking back to 2013, based on open-source research.



We can only be grateful for these efforts to gather information on police homicides so that we might—albeit slowly—start to hold police accountable for these deaths.

We do know how many civilians have died in the process of being arrested since 2003: 7,427…and then some.

II. Overview of Police Homicide Reporting Programs

The Death in Custody Reporting Act (PL 106-297) (DICRA) was enacted on October 13, 2000 in response to ongoing concerns about deaths in custody. It required states to submit information to the Justice Department about any death which occurred in the process of arrest (along with other circumstances), and punished the failure to do so with a loss of a percentage of Byrne/JAG grant funds.

To that end, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) was tasked with collecting and administering this data. BJS is not a law enforcement agency and is not housed under the FBI. It is a civilian agency housed in the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) within the Department of Justice. OJP also houses offices like BJA, NIJ, OJJDP, the SMART Office, and OVC.

Over the years, BJS created and maintained the program which Congress established, collecting detailed data about deaths which occurred in the process of arrest across the country. This program is known as the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program. DICRA's reporting requirements expired in 2006, although BJS continued to collect and report on data as it was submitted and received, even though no longer mandated. Sufficient data for analysis was collected from 2003-2009, and then again in 2011. DICRA was reauthorized in late 2014 (PL 113-242) and is codified at 42 U.S.C. 13727 and 13727a.

As often happens in the labyrinthine organization of the federal government, the left hand doesn't always know (or understand) what the right hand is doing. In this case, the wrist doesn't know what the index finger is doing—heck, maybe the first knuckle doesn't know what the second knuckle is doing. The lack of consistent and effective upper management is a feature--not a bug--of how the executive branch agencies of the federal government are structured. But that's another post for another day.

Hiding in plain sight all this time have been reports like Arrest-Related Deaths, 2003-2009: Statistical Tables and multiple products analyzing deaths in jails and prisons. Some folks have found them. Many have not.

Other data collection programs intended to gather information about police homicides, like the Supplemental Homicide Reports submitted as part of the UCR Program (SHR/UCR)(which is limited to "justifiable" police homicides), or the National Vital Statistics System, are, standing alone, insufficient to the task of answering the specific question:

How many civilians have our police killed in the process of an encounter or arrest?

That little agency (BJS) tucked deep down in the Justice Department has come up with an answer to the million dollar question. Stacked with statisticians, BJS has today issued two reports: Arrest-Related Deaths Program Assessment: Technical Report and Arrest-Related Deaths Program: Data Quality Profile. And for these reports, BJS specifically analyzed the data submitted to ARD (at BJS), SHR/UCR (at FBI), then, taking account of duplication and under-reporting, came up with a statistically sound and confident estimate of how many people had died during the course of being arrested.



There were a total of 7,427 people who died

in the process of being arrested during the years 2003-2009 & 2011.

There is no reliable source of publicly available information to provide an estimate of how many folks died during the process of arrest in either 2010 or 2012. Using the most elementary method of calculating the possible numbers, let’s assume (for the sake of argument) that the average number of deaths per year which occurred during the course of arrest (from our statistically sound number of 7,427 divided by 8 years) was approximately 928 deaths per year.

We are lucky enough to have some open-source-culled data for 2013 and 2014, so let’s proceed with that for those years. Reviewing the Killedbypolice.net website, a rough estimate for each year is 750 in 2013, and 1075 in 2014 (and remember, this is open-source research and likely underestimates the actual number). The numbers are rounded down…well, because even rounded down numbers are high enough to make the point.

Now, firing up the calculator on the desktop: 7,427 (2003-2009 & 2011) + 928 (2010) + 928 (2012) + 750 (2013) + 1,075 (2014)= 11,108.



There have been a bare minimum total of 11,108 people who died in the course of being arrested in the United States in the years 2003-2014.

When there are far more American civilians dead at the hands of our 'Civilian' Police than soldiers dead from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how can we say that what so many civilians experience from the police is anything other than warfare? When 11,000+ Americans have died while being arrested in the last twelve years, our analysis must shift from winning the "War on Crime" to stopping a "War on the People".

There is so much analysis than can be done using the numbers from the BJS report released today, and I hope the minds best qualified to do so are able to take up the task. Diving deep in to sociological (race, class), psychological (PTSD), theological ("just war"), criminological and other intersecting topics are lines of inquiry that simply must be pursued, pursued well, and pursued publicly.

And I want to be clear, as clear as I can be: not all of these homicides by police are unjustified or illegal under existing legal standards. Not every officer who killed a civilian would or should be subjected to any disciplinary action under existing standards. Some arrest-related deaths truly are due to an accident, intoxication, or suicide. Whether or not an arrest was the proximate cause of a death, or simply a contributing and significant factor...it counts. I write this post not to indict any particular officer, but to indict the systematic slaughter of our civilians.

VI. Now What?

So where do we go from here? If 11,000 deaths aren't enough to motivate some change, well, I don’t know what is. Knowing (roughly) how many people are dying during the course of being arrested is a starting place. To the extent that suicide, intoxication, or other medical causes are leading to such deaths, remedial measures should be implemented immediately.

Another way to move ahead—and I’ll be taking a look at other ideas going forward—is to acknowledge and start addressing some broad intersecting issues which create circumstances that seem to lead to a higher lethality rate during police encounters.



There are contributing factors to the deaths of individuals in the hands of police which become clear after only a cursory review of a sample of cases: Race. Race race race race race race (black folks, and hispanic folks, are at much higher risk of dying at the hands of the police);

Mental Health Issues (which the police are asked to handle without proper training);

Domestic Violence Calls (which are often highly charged environments for which police are not prepared);

Lack of Proportional Force (the tendency of police to fire a gun when a civilian has displayed/used a knife or other weapon which is not a firearm);

Pretextual Stops (traffic stops or stop-and-frisks which are conducted in order to engage in a more thorough search of the individual and/or vehicle—and can escalate quickly);

Failure to De-escalate (officers acting in such a way that the tension in an encounter continues to heighten unnecessarily);

Gun Control (a large number of individuals who are killed by police did have a gun in their possession and have either brandished or fired it prior to being shot)

And the only way we can get to 2028 without 11,000 more people dying in the hands of our police is to get serious, at all levels of our communities and government.

Otherwise, it will only be a question of whose names will be on the gravestones.