Official death certificates in the U.S. failed to count more than half of the people killed by police in 2015—and the problem of undercounting is especially pronounced in lower-income counties and for deaths that are due to Tasers, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In contrast, a database from the London-based Guardian newspaper captured a large majority of these deaths, the study found.

The study is the first to measure undercounting of police-related deaths in nationwide death certificate data and in a news media-based database and provides the most accurate count to date of the number of people killed by police in the U.S. It will be published online October 10, 2017 in PLoS Medicine.

"To effectively address the problem of law enforcement-related deaths, the public needs better data about who is being killed, where, and under what circumstances," said Justin Feldman, doctoral student at Harvard Chan School and lead author of the study. "But we also found that a different approach—compiling data from media reports—can help solve this problem."

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We created a new US-wide dataset by matching cases reported in a nongovernmental, news-media-based dataset produced by the newspaper The Guardian, The Counted, to identifiable NVSS mortality records for 2015. ... We estimated that the total number of law-enforcement-related deaths in 2015 was 1,166 (95% CI: 1,153, 1,184). There were 599 deaths reported in The Counted only, 36 reported in the NVSS only, 487 reported in both lists, and an estimated 44 (95% CI: 31, 62) not reported in either source. The NVSS documented 44.9% (95% CI: 44.2%, 45.4%) of the total number of deaths, and The Counted documented 93.1% (95% CI: 91.7%, 94.2%). ... One limitation of our analyses is that we were unable to examine the characteristics of cases that were unreported in The Counted.