Public Accounting
Recently the Washington Post released its annual count on the number of people killed by police in 2021. At least 1,055 people died at the hands of police last year. This is the highest death toll since the Post began carefully compiling the people killed in 2015. Despite years of sustained public scrutiny aimed at controlling police violence, the report notes, “Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years.”
The persistence of police violence, after efforts to provide technological solutions like body cameras and more than 400 separate pieces of legislation to increase accountability, is one of the primary reasons people are pressing to defund police. Police killings continue to be a fact of life and death in African American communities and other communities of color.
These numbers represent incalculable pain with the deaths of sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, cousins, friends, brothers and sisters, casual members of church and community. Often these are deaths coming in the guise of the most mundane activities, driving home, playing in a park, walking in the neighborhood.
The Post said that “Last year also stands out because one of those shot and killed by police was a young child — 8-year-old Fanta Bility. Bility was shot by Sharon Hill, Pa., police officers who fired at a car outside a high school football game in August. The officers mistakenly thought someone in the vehicle was firing at them, a grand jury said…The shooting marked the third time in the last seven years that police fatally shot a child under age 10. The other children, both 6, were killed in 2015 and 2017. Of the 1,055 people fatally shot last year, about 1 percent were juveniles — consistent with other years that The Post has tracked.”
As outrageous as the persistent pattern of violence is that lack of care in recording it. The only clear national database is kept by a team of Washington Post reporters. There is no national database to track police killings. Over the last decade journalists and non profit groups have attempted to fill in this gap.
A basic effort to create justice requires understanding the dimensions of injustice. This was the animating force behind the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who used her pen to document crimes against African Americans. Her newspaper articles in the 1890s and pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases, brought national attention to white violence. The NAACP, that Wells-Barnett co-founded, has kept the national chronicle of these crimes.
In Detroit, through the mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, Save Our Sons and Daughters, an organization dedicated to ending gun violence, held a reading every Thursday at the Spirit of Detroit to document the loss of children. For many years I worked with the Triangle Foundation as part of the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs, sending yearly reports of LGBTQIA+ individuals killed, sometimes by police, in the volunteer effort to document hate crimes unrecognized by any level of government.
Violence, especially by the state, will not stop as long as it is hidden. In recognition of this, the FBI is attempting to create a definitive database on how often police officers use force against individuals, through the National Use-of-Force Data Collection program begun in 2019. That program may never come into effect because police, sheriffs and federal law enforcement are not sending the information needed. The FBI is required to get at least 60% of law enforcement nationally to cooperate and, so far, it is below that level. It may never publish a single number.
Detroit is no better. The annual reports of the Board of Police Commissioners now mention the use of force and deadly encounters, but offer no precise numbers or circumstances. The one thing they could not hide, however, as that deadly force against people is increasing.
Excessive force and deadly encounters will continue until we demand a full public accounting of the loss of life. Since the days of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we have known that we cannot let people die in silence.