Frank Edwards & Michael H. Esposito:

Police in the U.S. kill on average more than 1,000 men per year, or about three men per day. According to our estimates, police are responsible for about 8 percent of all adult male homicide deaths in the U.S. each year.

These estimates come from our study, published on July 19. We relied on novel unofficial data collected through Fatal Encounters, a systematic review of media and public records searches by researchers and journalists. Our team of sociologists with expertise on race and health, which includes Hedwig Lee at Washington University in St. Louis, used these new data to estimate Americans’ underlying risk.

Our analysis shows that risk of police-involved death is two times higher than indicated by official data sources.

The problems with official data

On July 21, police killed five people across the U.S. Dale Slocum, 56, was killed by police in Toledo, Ohio. Eliuth Penaloza Nava, 50, was killed by police in Anaheim, California. Melyda Corado, 27, was killed by Los Angeles police. Ruben Maya, 37, was killed by police in Fresno, California. Vincent James Ewer II, 39, was killed by sheriff’s deputies in Tucson, Arizona.

Despite in-depth news coverage, you might not find these names in official databases of police-involved deaths collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Vital Statistics System. Police agencies are not required to submit information about killings to the federal government, and coroners often do not accurately classify deaths caused by police. Because police departments can choose whether to report these data, they often fail to do so. These gaps leave federal data on police killings – and thus the public’s understanding of these events – relatively thin.

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