Previously, it was accepted that citizens are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist but that might have been a radical underestimation, according to new official FBI data.
There is no national requirement for police departments to provide information about police-related shootings. Some stations do voluntarily provide the data to the FBI but that meant a national averages drastically underrepresented the number of people being killed at hands of police officers..
In this attempt by official record-keepers to assess the number of previously unknown “law enforcement homicides,” researchers found that an average of 928 people were killed by police annually over the same period, much more than the 383 number published by the FBI data before.
That number can be compared to the number that the number of civilians who have been killed as the result of terrorism. In 2013, the US Department of State puts that number at 16, the most recent year data there was available data.
Dividing the average of the number of people killed by police with the number of American citizens not in the military who were killed from terrorism, you get the 58, suggesting Americans are actually 58 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.
