A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Washington says that more than half of the police killings over the last 4 decades have been undercounted.

The frequent "just a few bad apples" response that's heard to frequent police criticism has been highly criticized in recent years, especially considering the rate of police killings and prevalence of wrongdoing around the country that has been witnessed or uncovered. Is it really just a few bad apples or is there a culture that has protected wrongdoing? Those bad actors who abuse their authority that get overlooked or protected along the way, they remain threats to the community and ignoring it doesn't make it go away, it just gets worse.

Now it's suggested that even those police killings that we know about might be greatly undercounted.

Police in the U.S. are allegedly killing civilians in the U.S. at a much higher rate than other countries, and that is despite the reported undercounting that might have occurred over the decades as well.

lack of national record keeping

There is a severe lack of national record keeping when it comes to those reports on officer killings. In recent years though more efforts have been made to try and keep track of problem officers and those police shootings as well, by criminologists and others. Still, if this recent study is true then the problem that we are seeing might be much worse than we are aware of fully because of that undercounting issue on cases.