My Take | Why are there no statistics for US police killings?

After the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, there is a creeping discourse in American public opinion and the media that questions why there is only outrage when blacks are killed by non-blacks such as white policemen.

The common refrain is that so-called black-on-black violence is far more prevalent and deadly, yet there is rarely outrage within black communities. A letter to the Post from an expatriate reader, presumably from the US, has made this claim: "Literally hundreds of young blacks, many of them innocent bystanders, have been killed by black men in gang violence in Chicago and the slaughter goes on every week with hardly a whimper of protest." Calling it "our selective outrage", Eugene Robinson, a writer with the Washington Post, makes a similar point in a recent column. This sounds familiar. Americans, among them the famous New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have criticised Muslims for refusing to denounce Islamic terrorism. Actually, many Muslims have denounced it. The Pew Research Centre has found a consistent majority in 10 out of 16 Muslim countries oppose terrorism. They just don't receive the same media attention, especially in the US, as when a subset of Islamic clerics expresses support. So it is with black-on-black violence.

It is the number one fear in black households living in low-income neighbourhoods, according to author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. There have been campaigns such as Stop the Violence, prompting mass rallies such as those in Brooklyn in 2012, Pittsburgh and New York in 2011, Saginaw, Michigan, in 2010 and Newark in 2009. Something else: There is a lot of data about intra-community killings among blacks but no reliable official data on how many people are shot or killed by police in the US each year.

A Washington Post survey arrived at an estimate of 1,000-plus killings by police each year. The FBI has fine-tuned data on black-on-black and white-on-white murders: in 2012, 2,614 whites were killed by whites while 2,412 blacks were killed by blacks. Yet it has no reliable numbers on killings by police because reports by police departments are voluntary. After decades of debate over police violence, you have to wonder why.