MOSCOW, August 15 (RIA Novosti) - There were approximately 400 cases of law enforcement officers involved in killings in the United States annually from 2006-2012, USA Today reports quoting the most recent figures released by the FBI.
An overview of the so-called justified homicide cases, legal killings of suspects by on-duty law enforcement officers, was released by USA Today Thursday. One of the documents in the investigation was a joint report from the FBI and Department of Justice.
An analysis of almost 2,800 cases of fatal shootings by police officers conducted by USA Today journalists concludes that the majority of the people killed were African-American males. Eighteen percent of blacks shot were under the age of 21, like Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 10.
The online newspaper notes that the killings included in the FBI and DOJ report were self-reported by police departments and have not been independently audited. Additionally, the database includes information on cases from 750 law enforcement agencies, while the USA Today contributors counted around 17,000 agencies across the country.
“There is no national database for this type of information, and that is so crazy. We've been trying for years, but nobody wanted to fund it and the (police) departments didn't want it,” Geoff Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina told USA Today. Alpert added “I've looked at records in hundreds of departments and it was very rare that you find someone saying, 'Oh, gosh, we used excessive force.' In 98.9 percent of the cases, they are stamped as justified and sent along.”
A criminologist from the University of Nebraska, Samuel Walker, who was also interviewed by USA Today, referred to the absence of a national repository tracking police homicide as a "major failure'' of the US criminal justice system.
In April 2014 the US Department of Justice released an inquiry into Albuquerque Police carried out a month after the fatal shooting of homeless man James Boyd by law enforcement officers. “Of the 20 officer-involved shootings resulting in fatalities from 2009 to 2012, we concluded that a majority of these shootings were unconstitutional,” outlined the report.
On August 10, in the city of Ferguson, a policeman fatally shot Michael Brown, 18 for allegedly resisting arrest. However, an eyewitness of the incident told CNN Wednesday that the officer shot and killed the teenager after he raised his hands in the air to prove he was unarmed and walked away from the officer’s police vehicle following an argument. US President Barack Obama ordered the FBI and the Department of Justice to join the investigation.
The homicide has triggered thousands-strong nationwide protests against police brutality in 90 cities, including New York.
