There is one straight up reason that easily accessed data about police killings (or any gun-damn national database of death by gun information in general) is hard to find.
Certain people do not want you to know.
I call them NRAterrorists (
n'rah terr'rists).
Here are two of the first five links on Google search for "national police killings database". My emphasis!
#5
Wikipedia (cited in next link- "I hesitate to say it, but the most comprehensive list of people killed by police that I found was on Wikipedia)
"Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the FBI does not collect these data either.
The annual average number of
justifiable homicides alone was previously estimated to be near 400. Updated estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics released in 2015 estimate the number to be around 930 per year, or 1240 if assuming that nonreporting local agencies kill people at the same rate as reporting agencies"
#1
fatal encounters dot org
"This project to create a comprehensive national database of people who are killed through interactions with police started with a simple question: How often does that happen?...
"There are all kinds of articles that point out the lack of data, for example, here’s one from the
New York Times in 2001. I kept returning to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s series
Deadly Force (Nov. 28, 2011) “The nation’s leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact,
no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.”...
"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/The first thing reporters say to me when I say there is no national database of people killed by law enforcement is, “Bullshit.” Almost to a person, they believe I missed something somewhere, and the database exists. Almost no one questions whether it should exist; after all, agencies with nothing to hide would have nothing to fear from transparency..."
"On June 2, 2015, U.S. Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced the Police Reporting Information, Data, and Evidence Act of 2015. Co-sponsors were Sens. Al Franken (D-MN), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Barbara Milkulski (D-MD).
Short and straightforward, the PRIDE Act would fund state efforts to collect data on all police shootings and other incidents resulting in deaths or serious injuries. The data would include casualties caused by law enforcement officers along with the deaths and injuries suffered by officers. The data would be reported to the U.S. Attorney General and then be made publicly available."
The other three links were all to The Washington Post; their reporting is referenced in the Wikipedia article.
The Guardian
The Wall Street Journal
Added edit: Want to know who doesn't want you to know? Watch the opposition to the PRIDE act.
Added link to
The Atlantic Magazine