Trends in Justifiable Homicides, United States
, 1988–2013 SOURCES: FBI, UCR, 1988–2013.
Unfortunately, the data may not be reliable because of incomplete participation by police depart- ments and inadequate record-keeping by depart- ments that do take part in the annual body count. Investigative reporters uncovered more than 550 police-involved killings between 2007 and 2012 that were missing from the SHR reports sent in to the UCR by over 100 of the country’s largest police departments. Consequently, they concluded that it is not clear how many people are killed by officers each year under circumstances that are deemed jus- tifiable (Barry and Jones, 2014). The completeness of UCR statistics about justifiable homicides carried out by victims under attack is not known.
A study based on SHRs discovered that race appears to play a role in influencing whether a fatal shooting is considered by the police to be a justifiable homicide or not. If the shooter was white and the person who was shot was white, then the homicide was considered to be justifiable in about 2 percent of all cases examined. If the shooter was black and the deceased person was white, then only 1 percent were deemed to be jus- tifiable. But if the shooter was white and the dead person was black, then the homicide was deemed to be justifiable in almost 10 percent of the cases in states without “stand your ground” laws and in 17 percent of the confrontations that unfolded in states with “stand your ground” statutes (Roman, 2013).
As for trends, as the level of lethal violence increased throughout the United States from the late 1980s into the early 1990s, the number of jus- tifiable homicides climbed as well. When the mur- der rate dropped sharply as the twentieth century came to a close, the body count from the defensive use of deadly force unleashed by victims and by law enforcement officers subsided too. Justifiable homi- cide by police officers peaked in 1994 but tumbled to its lowest level just six years later. Killing in self- defense by civilians showed basically the same trend, with the death toll topping out in 1993 but then subsiding to its lowest level in 2000. However, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, this statistical relationship and correlation reversed. The number of murders (and other violent offenses) across America fell substantially from 2000 to 2013,
but justifiable homicides carried out by victims of violence and by police officers went up consider- ably, as Figure 13.1 shows. In other words, prior to 2000, there was a direct relationship and a positive correlation between the level of violence in U.S. society and the forceful response by the authorities and by victims under attack. The lines rose and fell in tandem with the crime rate (not shown in Figure 13.1). After 2000, the situation reversed, an inverse relationship developed, a negative correlation emerged, and the lines reflecting justifiable homi- cide body counts by officers as well as by victims rose even though the rate fell for violent crimes in general (refer back to Figure 3.2) and for murders in particular (refer back to Figure 4.1).