Anybody got a take on why we're seeing a rash of this kind of thing? Are there actually more incidents statistically, or is it that we are only aware of more of them, partly because everyone's carrying a video camera?
It seems inconclusive from the few articles I've scanned.
From Politifact: Here’s the biggest problem: There is no mandate that local law enforcement agencies report officer involved shootings to the FBI. While 18,000 city, university, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily participate in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, just a small fraction of them willingly provide data on deadly force and justifiable homicides within their departments.
The article:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...are-deaths-police-shootings-highest-20-years/
From the WSJ: About a dozen agencies said their police-homicides tallies didn’t match the FBI’s because of a quirk in the reporting requirements: Incidents are supposed to be reported by the jurisdiction where the event occurred, even if the officer involved was from elsewhere. For example, the California Highway Patrol said there were 16 instances in which one of its officers killed someone in a city or other local jurisdiction responsible for reporting the death to the FBI. In some instances reviewed by the Journal, an agency believed its officers’ justifiable homicides had been reported by other departments, but they hadn’t.
Also missing from the FBI data are killings involving federal officers.
Police in Washington, D.C., didn’t report to the FBI details about any homicides for an entire decade beginning with 1998—the year the Washington Post found the city had one of the highest rates of officer-involved killings in the country. In 2011, the agency reported five killings by police. In 2012, the year Mr. Payton was killed, there are again no records on homicides from the agency.
The article:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hundred...re-uncounted-in-federal-statistics-1417577504