Factual Question About Number of Deaths While in the Custody of Police or While Being Arrested

First, I put this question in the GQ Forum because I do not want to discuss the social or political issues around the deaths being recently reported on. The questions I have are things that should have solid data available, not speculation. I wanted to know if there are any reliable sources of data that will help put the seemingly numerous deaths at or while in the hands of police officers lately into perspective or not.

Second, for the purpose of this post I would like to define the past as anything from post WWII, as this is roughly as far back as most Americans will be able to remember personally.

With that said here is the Question:
Are there more or less deaths nationwide while being apprehended by or while in the custody of the police than in the past?

If there are more deaths are they in proportion to the numbers of people being apprehended? (i.e. 10,000 people arrested in 1950, 100 died due to police actions -v- 100,000 people arrested in 2010, 300 died due to police action. This would indicate a reduction in deaths per number of incidents.)

Any reliable sources of data would be appreciated.

I may look around; but I would dispute the idea that deaths in police custody are always or generally due to ‘police action’ — or even to ‘police inaction’ ( failing to alert medical services etc. ) — or Steve Biko type events.
Obviously, people do have falling down the stairs stuff going on, but for many people being arrested is traumatic already and can lead innocently enough to a massive heart attack. Whilst many druggies, having neglected their physical and mental hygiene regimes, are prime candidates for choking on their own vomit alone in the cells.

Here is link to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, page on deaths in custody. It only goes back to 2000. I don’t think there would be very good statistics before then since there are thousands of police departments and it would be difficult to aggregate that data.

Thanks for that link. I see some info there that might begin to answer the question with some filtering. Kinda weird how this is not really tracked as well as I would have thought.

That would probably have something to do with those social or political issues you don’t want to discuss.

Start with the Bureau of Justice Statistics report
Arrest-Related Deaths Program Assessment: Technical Report:

The true number of annual police killings, according to the report, is likely around 930 — about twice that of each of the two other U.S. government counts. It’s even higher — about 1,240 — if you assume that local law enforcement agencies that don’t report any killings have killed people at the same rate as agencies that do.

Researchers who specialize in estimating unreported violent deaths issued a critique of the report, saying the true number is higher:

Do you think newspaper articles are factual enough? If so you can read the individual accounts of all people killed by the police and make your own determinations.
Here is the website:

Here is the Facebook:

Here is a post I made here last December:

Here’s a good article on deaths at the hands of police at fivethirtyeight.

When fivethirtyeight says an accurate number is hard to come by, I believe them.