Newly released records obtained by The Guardian show that the high-profiled killings of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and John Crawford are all missing from FBI-collected data.
According to officials, police departments aren’t required to submit police-involved killings to federal officials. Though some of the recent high-profile deaths have been tracked, Rice (the 12-year-old killed by Cleveland police while holding a toy gun), Garner (the 43-year-old father who died after being placed in an illegal chokehold by an NYPD officer) and Crawford (the 22-year-old fatally shot by Ohio police while holding a toy rifle in Walmart) are all omitted from the records.
“It’s just another part of the cover-up and erasing of his murder from the record,” Garner’s daughter, Erica, said to reporters. “It says to the NYPD and the city and state of New York that my father’s life doesn’t matter.”
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Shockingly, the state of Florida has failed to submit any data on police-related deaths in the last 10 years. The NYPD submitted data only one year in the past decade. Additionally, the information that is recorded by the federal government fails to note whether the victims were armed.
“You can get online today and figure our how many tickets were sold to The Martian,” FBI director James Comey told The Guardian. “The CDC can do the same with the flu. It’s ridiculous—it’s embarrassing and ridiculous—that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.”