A team of decorated Harvard researchers are calling on the U.S. Public Health Agencies to consider police killings as public health issues.

The proposal was inspired by a year of public protests leading to the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement, which largely stemmed from the police killing of unarmed Ferguson, Missouri teen Michael Brown, according to The New York Times.

In August 2014, Brown was shot and killed by then-Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, sparking outrage and protest in the area and across much of the nation. Since then, several other high-profile police killings of unarmed suspects have taken place, only adding to the level of outrage and angst felt in many communities.

According to The Guardian, 1,058 Americans have died at the hands of law enforcement this year, with the number of police related deaths of African-Americans ranking twice as high as similar deaths in the white population.

Known as "The Counted," the Harvard project points out U.S. civilians are killed by police at an average of about three times a day.

The study also highlights that, while all deaths of police officers are well documented, there is no reliable database for incidents where civilians are killed by officers.

Other than the longstanding resistance by police departments to making such information publicly available, researchers contend such data is easily countable, as evidenced by "The Counted," which revealed that over 500 people in the U.S. had been killed by the police between Jan. 1 and June 9, 2015. That figure is twice what would be expected based on estimates from the FBI.

Researchers add making police killings a notifiable condition would require police departments to report each killing to their corresponding Public Health Department, paving the way for all law-enforcement related deaths to be documented in real time.