Not only do government agencies fail to track official violence against Americans, they also sometimes pre-emptively exonerate all such attacks. A 2001 Justice Department report entitled “Policing and Homicide, 1976-1998” labeled everyone in the nation who perished as a result of a police shooting as “felons justifiably killed by police.” There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people shot unjustifiably by the police in those decades, but their innocence vanished in the flicker of a federal label. The Justice Department was so embarrassed by the report’s “lack of distinction between justifiable police shootings and murders, that it did not send out its usual promotional material announcing the report,” according to the New York Times.