"When people show you who they are, believe them." —
Maya Angelou to Oprah Winfrey
That quote from Maya Angelou is painfully appropriate when we consider the crisis of police brutality in America. The police clearly are showing us who they are, but not only that, our federal government also cares so little about this issue that it really cannot produce even the most basic data on how many people are police killing in our country.
“It’s a national embarrassment,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminology professor who often consults with the Justice Department on its studies. “Right now, all you know is what gets on YouTube.”
More than 20 years ago, Congress ordered the Justice Department to collect national data on excessive force by police. But as demonstrated by the recent survey’s inability to properly measure any use of force, that obligation has been virtually impossible to meet, in large part because of the difficulty of collecting reliable data from the nation’s roughly 18,000 state and local police departments.
I don't know if you missed that, but Congress ordered reliable data on police brutality when Bill Clinton was president. We're waiting, still, for this to happen because it's not a priority.
Here's how bad and far off the numbers from the federal government are:
The last official estimate from the FBI was that about 400 people per year are killed by police. We actually crossed 400 people killed by police on May 3 with seven months of the year yet to tally.
In other words, agents of the FBI, which stands, if you may recall, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have no idea what they are talking about in this matter. If they've honestly investigated it, we're all in trouble.
Since the federal government has bungled this, a citizen is monitoring the cases now by scanning all media sources with Google alerts.
The Guardian is also doing a tremendous job tracking these horrible statistics.
The Washington Post is keeping track, too, focusing just on people shot and killed by police, not those killed by other means while in police custody.