Field-Data Essay Series
Counting the Killings
Who counts the people US police kill, and why five databases never agree.
The United States does not reliably count the people its police kill. The authoritative national numbers are built by a newspaper, activists, and a volunteer, not by the state, and they disagree because they measure different things. This series reads that gap as a legibility problem, at the level of systems and design. Every figure is frozen into a cited, hashed open-data release you can download and re-check.
- 01Who Counts the KillingsThe state's own count was too incomplete to publish, so a newspaper, a nonprofit, and a volunteer started counting.
- 02The Federal Blind SpotThe FBI has the widest definition of all and, for most of its life, could not publish a national total.
- 03Five Counters, Five DefinitionsNo two projects report the same total, because no two are counting the same thing.
- 04The Definition GapChange one rule about what counts, and about a hundred people a year appear or vanish.
- 05The Open DataA series about counting owes you a count you can open, test, and argue with yourself.
- 06How Many Did Nobody CountMatch the databases person by person and the surprise is agreement. The real undercount turns out to be the government's own death records.
Live instruments
The ReconciliationThe field-data hub. Five counters side by side, the 2015 definition gap drawn live, and the hashed release with a recompute-it-yourself verify panel.The OverlapThe record-level layer. The three civilian lists nested from MPV's own linkage, the definitional residue decomposed, and why capture-recapture breaks here while the government's vital statistics missed 55 percent.The Federal Blind SpotThe one count the government runs, drawn as a coverage curve against the 80 percent threshold it needs before it can publish a total, cleared only in 2024.The Open DataSix tables as CSV and JSON, hashed and versioned, CC-BY-4.0, now with the record-level overlap. Derived aggregates only, never a re-hosted roster of the people who died.