“The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police,” a new ProPublica report explains, noting that if whites were killed at the same ratio there would have been another 185 white deaths, just during that three-year period, just of those in that narrow age range.
To arrive at this statistic, ProPublica analyzed the list of 12,000 police shooting deaths that were self-reported by agencies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation between 1980 and 2012. Because this data is self-reported and departments are not required to submit information, this data likely significantly undercounts the number of shootings. Florida departments, for example, haven’t submitted data since 1997 and New York City hasn’t submitted data since 2007. And the FBI asks only for “justifiable homicide”figures, meaning in those instances where the shootings are most overtly viewed as unjustified or the litigation is ongoing, departments are less likely to report.