WASHINGTON -- U.S. law enforcement officials have shot and killed at least 385 people so far this year, a rate of more than two per day, The Washington Post has reported.
The death rate is more than twice that tallied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the past decade, the newspaper said in a report published over the weekend.
"We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don't begin to accurately track this information," Jim Bueermann, head of the Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving law enforcement, was quoted as saying.
Bueermann, a former police chief, said police shootings in the United States were "grossly under-reported."
"There is a compelling social need for this, but a lack of political will to make it happen," he added.
The newspaper found that relative to the overall population, blacks were killed at three times the rate of other minorities or whites in the police killings.
The Post report came as the United States saw several high-profile cases of police violence against black suspects in the past year that led to violent protests and rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in recent months.
The latest unrest took place in Cleveland, Ohio, a week ago, when a white police officer was acquitted in the killing of two unarmed blacks in 2012.
