Killings by cops apparently going up; killings of cops going down

The number of felony suspects fatally shot by police last year — 461— was the most in two decades, according to a new FBI report.
The justifiable homicide count, contained in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, has become increasingly scrutinized in recent months as questions continue to be raised about the use of lethal force by law enforcement.

It’s the third straight year we’ve seen an increase. If you’ve been reading The Watch regularly, you’ll know that we hit that figure in the same year that killings of police officers reached a 50-year low. Last year also saw a drop in violent crime. There are about eight to nine killings by cops for every killing of a cop. (The FBI reported 48 felonious deaths of police officers in 2012, the last year for which data were available.)
The article also mentions another problem we’ve discussed here: It’s difficult to say just how much the figure is rising because police departments are historically bad at actually reporting this data.
University of Nebraska criminologist Samuel Walker said the incomplete nature of the data renders the recent spike in such deaths even more difficult to explain.

 Bottom line: We should want cops killing people less often. Instead, they seem to be killing people more, even as the threat to cops is diminishing, and society itself is getting safer. And it’s simply unacceptable that we get precise data about cops killed on the job, but only sloppy, incomplete data about who, when and how many cops kill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/11/13/killings-by-cops-apparently-going-up-killings-of-cops-going-down/