“The Daily Show” correspondent Samantha Bee took a close look on Tuesday night at the fact that there are no statistics about the number of civilians shot by police each year.
During her report, Bee interviewed former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Kerik was “confident” that the data existed and said that it “goes somewhere in the federal government.”
“Oh that data goes somewhere,” Bee said. “It goes like this: ‘Poof!’ And then it just disperses to the wind.”
Bee even flagged down statistician Nate Silver in hopes of tracking the data down. Unfortunately even he couldn’t help as he confirmed “those statistics just don’t exist.”
“You know no mom wants to think that their child will grow up to become just another statistic,” Bee said. “Thankfully, given the current state of our laws, there’s no chance of that ever happening.”
Watch the video below, courtesy of Comedy Central:
There isn’t much out there in terms of statistical analysis, but some people are trying:
As far as I can tell they haven’t posted an update on this since August but Deadspin is crowdsourcing a police shooting database for the last three years. I for one really hope that they can complete the project.
I don’t see the problem. Why not just change the definition of what counts as a police shooting of a civilian, say it only counts if a muzzle loading, flint lock manufactured on February 29, 1999 between the hours of 23:48 and 23:49 GMT in the event?
We can redefine political corruption so that it doesn’t exists, why can’t we do it with police shootings?
Yes we can!!!
When you combine this disturbing but not surprising report, with the excellent story by John Oliver this week about widespread Police confiscation of 2.5 billion in cash from motorists throughout the country, its clear that the major networks fail to report anything of consequence about police behavior in this country unless its shoved down there throats by the comedians.
That is because they never “Bite the hand that feeds you.”
No questions about Kerik’s trysting flat? I hope Bee showered after this interview with a verifiable scum bag.