Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday denounced the lack of information collected by the federal government on killings involving police officers.
“The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,” he said at a Justice Department event honoring Martin Luther King Jr. “This strikes many–including me–as unacceptable. Fixing this is an idea that we should all be able to unite behind.”
The issue has become a hotly debated subject after the high profile killings by police officers of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner–all unarmed black males–and the point-blank fatal shootings of New York Police Department officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
Despite claims about a lack of good information collected by the federal government, private organizations use open sources to gather data on the subject.
A Facebook group that tracks the number of police-involved killings using media reports claims that at least 1,100 people were killed by law enforcement officials in 2014, and that 39 have already been killed this January. The group, “Killed By Police,” was called “the most reliable database” by fivethirtyeight.com.
The Office Down Memorial Page documents instances of occupational fatalities suffered by law enforcement officers. In 2014, it said 121 police officers were killed on the job–an increase from 105 the year before.
As The Sentinel reported in December, the Labor Department’s statistics show that law enforcement officers often suffer from a lower rate of occupational injuries and fatalities than other types of workers. Nurses are more likely to be injured than local cops. State-level police officers are less likely to suffer work-related injuries than woodworkers, pilots, messengers, and certain type of farm workers. And fatalities per hours worked, for law enforcement officers, was lower in 2013 than it was for farmers, landscapers, maintenance workers, loggers, fishers, construction laborers, roofers, miners, power line workers, pilots, truck drivers, taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and trash collectors.
Protests against police killings of unarmed civilians–mostly people of color–have continued in the wake of the high profile summer incidents and the subsequent lack of indictments. In Boston on Thursday, demonstrators blocked a highway during rush hour to demonstrate against “police and state violence against Black people,” Black Lives Matter Boston said in a press release. Demonstrators with a similar message are planning a march in Minneapolis on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this Monday.
