Mainly because police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics, so the data is horribly incomplete. And as anybody knows, you can massage the data to show anything you want when you don't have the complete picture:

Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.

That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/0...

The other problem with your data is that there is no firm evidence how each of these scenario's played out. Did the person being shot pull a firearm? What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account. All people see is a cop who killed a citizen, nobody knows the exact circumstances around every single one of these instances - which makes ALL the data that much more suspect.

So yeah, when you look at the raw numbers, they look bad, but when you add in the circumstances by which these played out, you'd probably find out a lot of these were justified - which is why cops tend to get a lot of leeway in these kinds of scenarios, and are rarely charged.

That is true, but not to the US' credit. In the UK, the records are compiled nationally and are beyond question. There have been three fatal police shootings here in 2015; all of them were front-page national news.

The US keeps no such records, and until http://killedbypolice.net/ began compiling credible news reports, nobody was keeping national records. The numbers on killedbypolice.net are therefore an absolute minimum for how many people are killed by police in America. Killings which are not well-documented in the news aren't included. If the number is inaccurate, then the picture in America is even worse.

Undoubtedly many of them are justified. America is awash in guns, and if somebody is shooting at you, then undoubtedly you have the right to shoot back. However only 48% of those who were killed had a firearm on or near them (it doesn't necessarily mean they were using it).[1] Many of the remainder are classified as being "armed", but that includes cases like this mentally ill man who was killed for holding a screwdriver in an unthreatening manner[2], so those numbers should be considered suspect. Finally, there are hundreds of killings every year of people who cannot be considered "armed" by any definition. Many of these are well-documented on video; if you want to spend the next few hours watching snuff films, they're easy enough to find.

The punishment for the overwhelming majority of these killings is a paid vacation for the murderer.

Something is desperately wrong with America.

1: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...

2: https://www.rt.com/usa/252533-dallas-screwdriver-shooting-ju...

I may be a bit pedantic here, but I think that's an unfortunate choice of words. If I understand the legal situation in the US correctly, Culling of individuals by power of government can only be justified through a judge, and executed with consent from a state governor.

Some of the cullings may be defensible, given the nature of the police's job. But in my view, none are justified.

That is a big part of the problem itself.

What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account

.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.

The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.

The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.

So if that's true why isn't information gathered about every single round of ammunition that's fired? Because every time that trigger is pulled is a time when someone (the officer, a member of the public) is at risk of death, and pulling the trigger carries a very real risk of killing the alleged perpetrator. (Or innocent bystanders).

It's baffling to me that statistics like these are not kept.

Maybe this would be too high a burden. But at least they should keep numbers on how many people they kill, and what the precise situation was around that death.

This is true, for the US. It is also one of the symptoms of what is wrong with "enforcement" in that country.

Police officers in many other countries (such as Germany for instance) are explicitly instructed to shoot to wound if at all possible - and with good results both in terms of getting their suspects arrested but not killed, and in terms of not getting killed themselves. Indeed, this is not just the case for police worldwide, but even for the US armed forces when working under "nation building" rules of engagements rather than "total war" rules of engagements.

A shoot-to-kill doctrine is an obvious sign that rather than having an attitude of serving and protecting their community, the enforcers are serving/protecting themselves first.

And obviously this is not an isolated incident hence much of the anger directed at police. Guns should be last resort but sadly is not the case today.

[1] http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/san-francisco-sfpd-police-shoo...

Just because an officer kills, doesn't mean it was a crime and it doesn't mean the officer overstepped his bounds.

Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.

So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.

Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.

(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Yeah, it sucks when someone comes armed with facts, doesn't it?

And split it by areas. I don't think anyone would find if suspicious that cops kill more people in crime-infested poor neighborhood with constant gang violence than in a high-middle class London suburb.

Or maybe you meant to argue that crime rate is an indicator for general lawlessness of the population, in which case crime rate and police violence are two sides of the same coin?

How is it not obvious?

See the graphic at the bottom of this page and feel free to peruse the linked dataset as well.

http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/2015

But then again, you get stuff like this https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/12/los-angeles-deput...

Crime is correlated to localized socioeconomic situations. FTFY.

Single occurences are irrelevant if we're talking about trends. I can conjure an emotional story to prove any possible outlook on this problem.

Yes, crime is correlated to socioeconomic situations, that doesn't contradict anything in my comment.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/29/many-countries-po...

ryana posted a link re crime rates not really making a difference.

"While some have blamed violent crime for being responsible for police violence in some communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not appear to make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people."

Your turn to back up your claim that "Crime rate is correlated with amount of situations where use of lethal force is necessary."

My initial assumption was based on the soviet research from the late 80s on this subject, but I couldn't easily find a link right now. (Yes, I know what you think of soviet police system, and you're right in general, but I know the people who did this research and the political climate itself was pretty vegetarian too at the time).

It's a bit curious that you haven't answered my original question, or come back with anything substantive apart from expressing surprise at someone not understanding what you meant by "Aren't?"