Police departments across the country compile many statistics on crime, and have done so for a long time. What is now the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) was first conceived in 1929.
But police do not consistently track the numbers of people killed by police. So assessing who gets killed and why requires a bit more sleuthing, and the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark has undertaken just such an investigation.
Researchers used both national death reporting statistics and numbers compiled by Fatal Encounters, a journalist-led database on police shootings. Frank Edwards from Rutgers and D. Brian Burghart of Fatal Encounters join us with details of their work.