PressTV: Hundreds of FBI homicides unaccounted for in US crime statistics

…  by  PressTV, Tehran

–  First published  December 6, 2014  –

Hundreds of police killings have gone unreported in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a new report reveals as protests continue across the US over recent grand juries’ decisions in police shooting cases.

The Saturday report by the Wall Street Journal suggests that more than 550 homicides by police officers between 2007 and 2012 were unaccounted for at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

The broadsheet found that while 1,800 people were killed by officers of at least 105 police departments during that period, the FBI has only filed the record of some 1,200 of those killings.

According to the WSJ, the lack of complete data makes it almost impossible to figure out how many people have been killed by police across the US every year.

Some of the unreported cases were justified by the departments as justifiable deaths that did not need not to be reported, while some agencies did not consider the events to be actual offenses.

In certain cases, if an officer killed someone in a city or town out of their jurisdiction, they believed that particular town would handle the report while they had not done so.

Demands for more transparency on police brutality have been pushed by the public after the August shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson. The Ferguson police department has only recorded one justifiable homicide between 1976 and 2012, according to statistics.