By Mustafa Caglayan
NEW YORK
The number of Americans killed by local police from 2007 to 2012 exceeds the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last five years, official statistics show.
A report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in August says that police forces committed 1,995 "justifiable" killings in the U.S. between 2007 and 2012.
However, the number of police killings can be much higher as there are no statistics on unjustifiable slayings.
The issue is once more under the spotlight after a wave of anger spread across the country following a grand jury decision to not indict a white policeman for fatally shooting an unarmed black teen in August.
The incident has also exposed a noticeable lack of statistics on how many Americans the police kill every year in total.
The FBI's report appears to be the only solid information about the issue. However, it is far from being complete, considering that only 750 out of 117,000 local police organizations contributed to it.
Moreover, it has no tally of "unjustifiable" police killings.
The report also shows that nearly twice each week, a white police officer killed a black person during the same five-year period.
That small FBI statistic becomes shocking, considering that the number exceeds the tally of five years of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During a five-year period ending in November 2014, a total of 1,523 American fatalities have been reported in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to official data.
U.S. military operations are the most intense in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the homeland appears to be a more deadly battlefield for Americans.
The U.S. is also the most armed country in the world, with 90 guns for every 100 citizens, a survey by Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies shows.
It says American citizens possess 270 million of the 875 million known firearms worldwide.
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