Jason Jones took over last night's Daily Show in place of Jon Stewart, who's out sick with the bubons. While Jones was busy making (pretty good) jokes as his own expense, "Senior My Wife Correspondent" Sam Bee handled the actual reporting, delivering a piece on the complete lack of any national statistics on police killings of civilians.

States are required by federal law to report stats on fatal civilian shootings to the DOJ, but that federal law doesn't actually come with consequences or a mechanism for enforcement, so the numbers just disappear. Even Nate Silver has no idea how many people cops kill in a year.

So it falls to independent projects like the ones run by Nevada reporter D. Brian Burghart—who appears in this episode—or Kyle Wagner of popular criminal justice data clearinghouse Deadspin, to tabulate the death toll.

Deadspin's crowdsourced effort has logged more than 1,500 incidents, and it could still use your help.

How about that Jason Jones, though? If Stewart retired tomorrow, the Daily Show would probably be just fine.

[h/t Digg]