In the weeks and months following the shooting death of Michael Brown by now-former Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, the nation has been engaged in a debate about the number of citizens, unarmed or otherwise, that have been killed by law enforcement officers.

In a recent national television interview, Marc Morial, the CEO of the National Urban League, illustrated the current state of the numbers.  In the interview, Morial said this:

"The number of killings of citizens by police is at a two-decade high."

Our partners at PolitiFact took a look at Morial's claim to see if it was accurate or not.  PolitiFact reporter Joshua Gillin says that Morial's claim rates HALF TRUE on the Truth-O-Meter.  Gillin says that the numbers that Morial cites are essentially voluntarily-reported numbers.

"We took a look at Marc Morial's statement, and his statement mirrors a USA Today story that got its statistics from an FBI database," said Gillin.  "Those statistics include numbers for justifiable homicides by a law enforcement officer.  Based on those statistics alone, Morial is correct, because the database reports 460 people were killed by police officers in 2013, the most since 1994, when 458 people were killed by law enforcement officers."

Gillin says, though, that the database numbers aren't telling the complete story.  "This database gets its numbers from somewhere around 18,000 different state, local, and other law enforcement agencies are reporting their numbers to the FBI" said Gillin.  "The catch here is that there's no mandate to say that every law enforcement agency has to report the numbers.  In other words, it's an optional report, so there's no real way to know whether or not the numbers cited in the report are 100 percent accurate.  They may indicate a trend, but because not every single agency is reporting data, there can't be a definitive finding, one way or the other, on the accuracy of the numbers cited by Morial's statement."

Because of the lack of complete data, the reported numbers, while accurate within the confines of the data on hand, don't tell the whole story, which leads to a HALF TRUE rating on PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter.

 

SOURCES: Police shooting deaths at 20-year high?