Critical Assessment of an Analysis of a Journalistic Compendium of Citizens Killed by Police Gunfire

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12283
• Date: 01 February 2017
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Author: Lee Ann Slocum,David A. Klinger

POLICY ESSAY

CIVILIANS KILLED BY POLICE

Critical Assessment of an Analysis of a

Journalistic Compendium of Citizens Killed

by Police Gunfire

David A. Klinger

Lee Ann Slocum

University of Missouri—St. Louis

In recent years, as the use of deadly force by police officers came to be one of the most

highly visible social issues in the United States,many groups and individuals (including

the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]; Comey, 2015) were stunned

to learn that because “official” U.S. government statistics on officer-involved shootings are

chock full of holes, our justice system has no decent notion of how often American police of-

ficers fell citizens with gunfire (see, e.g., Fyfe, 2002, and Klinger,2012, for discussions of the

measurement problems). The Washington Post (hereafter, the Post)decidedtostepintothis

breach and track all instances in which U.S. police officers fatally shoot citizens from January

1, 2015 forward. Their efforts yielded a user-friendly, easily searchable Internet database

of 991 cases where police gunfire caused the death of citizens in 2015.1The FBI reported

just 442 “justifiable homicides” by American law enforcement officers in 2015 (U.S. FBI,

2015), which demonstrates how poor are “official” statistics concerning this critical matter.

Given that the Post’s database provides a far more complete count of deaths from police

gunfire than do government statistics, it is no surprise that social scientists would turn their

attention to these data to examine various issues related to the use of deadly force. And

Justin Nix, Bradley Campbell, Edward Byers, and Geoffrey Alpert (2017, this issue) have

done just that. By focusing on cases that the Post counts as (a) not involving an attack

on an officer or a citizen and (b) involving unarmed suspects, Nix et al. sought to assess

whether they could uncover evidence of implicit bias on the part of the officers who had

killed suspects in 2015. After reading carefully Nix et al.’s treatment and analysis of the

Direct correspondence to David A. Klinger, Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St. Louis,

One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63121 (e-mail: KlingerD@msx.umsl.edu).

1. The

Post’s

fatal officer-involved shooting data collection efforts continue, with a tally of 800 people

killed by police bullets in the first 10 months of 2016 (this essay was crafted in late October and early

November 2016).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12283 C2017American Society of Criminology 349

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 1