MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The United States needs a clear guideline on how to collect the data on police killings as the existing mechanisms significantly underestimate the real figures, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Friday.
"The Justice Department needs to provide clear guidance to the states, through BJS [Bureau of Justice Statistics], on how to generate accurate and valid data… There is a methodological solution that requires only political will, in the form of resources and collaboration across agencies and jurisdictions, to implement," Brian Root, HRW Quantitative Analyst said in an article published on the organization's website.
HRW stressed that the current data collection system also fails to provide information on geography, demographics and other important variables of the incidents that could have helped examine trends.
Police violence in the United States has been in the spotlight recently after officers killed two African American men, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in New York and Ferguson.
In December US Congress passed a law clarifying how the data on police killings should be gathered and introducing financial penalty for non-compliance. The law requires gathering data on the victims who were killed while detained by police and not just during the arrest or while in custody.
