Number of U.S. blacks killed by police hard to pin down with no official figures

It's been nearly two years since the high-profile law enforcement killings of 18-year-old Ferguson, Mo.,resident Michael Brown, New York father Eric Garner, and other unarmed black men (or children, in the case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice) sparked months of widespread unrestand callsfor police reform across the U.S.

And yet, here we are again as a societyin the summer of 2016,still debating andstill protesting over the issue of raciallymotivated brutality.

The back-to-backdeaths ofAlton SterlingandPhilandoCastilethis week at the hands of police officers in Louisiana andMinnesotarespectivelyset off a new rash of protests that came to a head in Dallason Thursday whenfive police officers were killed by a sniper.

• Why is it so hard to find official data on fatal US police shootings?

Calling for agreater sense of urgency in addressing America's"broader set of racial disparities," U.S. President BarackObama told reporters on Thursdaythat blackswere shot by policeat more than twice the rate of whiteslast year.

The Guardian, however,peggedthe 2015 rate of death for young black men, specifically, as five times higher than white men of the same age.

"More black people were killed by U.S. police in 2015 than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow," reported Quartzin the wake of Sterling and Castile's deaths,citing different data fromeitherObama's or the Guardian's.

"The police are killing people as often as they were before Ferguson,"wroteFiveThirtyEight,pointing tonot one but six separate data sources for U.S. police killings.

While all of these statements may be true, it'shard to say for certain how bad the problem reallyis without official statistics.

As it stands, acomprehensive government database trackinghow many times American police officers have useddeadly force does not exist. Local law enforcement agencies mayvoluntarily submit thenumber of people killed each year in the line of dutyto the FBI,but it's not mandatory, and it's only done about half the time, according to estimates.

"You can get online and figure out how many tickets were sold to The Martian," said FBI Director James Comey in October, expressing hisfrustration. "It's ridiculous 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."

But where policy has failed in this regard, activists, academics and journalists have picked up the slack with extensive research and documentation.

Below are four of the most well-regarded and widelysourcedonline trackers for civilian deaths at the hands of police in the U.S. today (along with Gun Violence Archive, Killed by Police, and the FBI's own,admittedly incomplete, SupplementaryHomicide Reports)

'Fatal Force' bythe Washington Post

Number of U.S. blacks killed by police, 2015 to present:381

The Washington Post's PulitzerPrize-winning database tracksonlydeathsin which a U.S. police officer shoots, and kills, a civilian in the line of duty,"the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter."

There have been1,499 such deaths intotalacross the U.S.since January2015, according to the Post, which also uses the data to display insights such as "almost allof the people shot and killed by policewere men" and "body-worn police cameraswere known to be recording inone in eightfatal police shootings."

'The Counted' by the Guardian

Number of U.S. blackskilled by police, 2015 to present: 442

Like the Washington Post, the Guardian has collected data from a shorter span of time than some larger, crowdsourced trackers only about 18 months.

The database, which counts 1,702 deaths in total,is still one of the most widelyregarded.Comey himself gave both the Guardian and the Post an inadvertentcompliment last year by telling a private gathering of politicians "itis unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians."

Fatal Encounters

Number of U.S. blackskilled by police, January2000 to present: 2,600-plus

Founded in 2012 after the killing of anunarmed Alabamacollege studentnamed Gil Collar, Fatal Encounters collects information dating back to 2000 frompaid researchers, public record requests, and crowdsourceddata.

The project ishelmedbyD. Brian Burghart, a journalism instructor atthe University of Nevada, Reno, with support from data specialists based in Canada, Norway, Australia and the U.S.

As of June 23, the Fatal Encounters database had a total of 14,042 records for people killed during interactions with U.S. police since 2000, approximately 2,600 of them for blacks and 4,600 for people marked as "race unspecified."

These numbers aren't complete, though. As thegroup'swebsite states,"we're about 62 per cent of the way to the total of what we think will beabout 22,700 total records at the end of 2016."

Mapping Police Violence

Number of U.S. blacks killed by police, 2015 total: 346

Mapping Police Violence, a research collaborative, bills itself as "the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013."

The project's stated goal is toquantify the effects of police violence in communities, and it does this by creating accessible maps, graphs, charts and infographicsusing data from both external and internal resources: obituaries,social media profiles,criminal recorddatabases, police reports anddatabases compiled by siteslike Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police.

"Law enforcement agencies across the country have failed to provide us with even basic information about the lives they have taken," the website reads. "In a country where at least three people are killed by police every day, we cannot wait for police departments to provide us with these answers."