Flaws in FBI's Uniform Crime Reports Prevent Progress

In the course of doing research for an article called "Demythologizing the Police" -- which examines the civil ideology that surrounds the police -- I've discovered a shocking fact. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports tracks justifiable homicides by law enforcement. And well it should. But it doesn't track, nor could a UCR editor tell me how to discover, the national statistics for unjustifiable police homicides, ones which may result in administrative proceedings, civil lawsuits, or criminal prosecutions.

In other words, no one at the FBI can tell me, because no one at the FBI thinks it important enough to track, how often police kill citizens in acts of unjustified lethal force. There simply is no national tracking of illegal or unjustified police uses of lethal force. None. Zero. Zip. So confirms a researcher at the Police Foundation with whom I spoke this afternoon.

I find that shocking and negligent. How can we hope to work on this problem until or unless we can begin to quantify it? Is it getting worse? Getting better? No one knows. What's worse: no one can know.