I recommend everyone consider these statistics before rioting and flying off the handle: Washington Post comprehensive database of police shootings in the U.S for 2019.: 1,004 killings. 802 of which the race is specified, 371 white, 236 black. Vast majority were armed, total of 10 cases of unarmed blacks killed by the police and going down every year.
And for comparision, everyone might also want to compare these statistics with those for police shootings in other countries.
The shooting of unarmed black man Walter Scott by white police officer Michael Slager - who has since been charged with murder - in South Carolina earlier this month brought the issue of fatal police shootings in the US into sharp focus once more.
www.indy100.com
This chart shows reported fatal police shootings since 2009 in selected countries.
www.statista.com
In 2018--2019 there were all of three people killed in England and Wales in police shootings. Three.
Let that sink in for a bit.
I've taken a look at the
WaPo article and their explanation of
How The Washington Post is examining police shootings in the United States and it's not completely clear how they arrive at their figure.
They explain that
In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the person was experiencing a mental-health crisis — by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. The Post conducted additional reporting in many cases.
[....]
The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. Since 2015, The Post has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as recorded on average annually.
but they can only include deaths which don't appear in the main FBI/CDCP databases if they are reported in the local press.
As it happens, I was reading the British literary magazine
Granta yesterday and found an article from 2015 on the difficulties of assessing the number of people killed each year by the police in the US, a statistic that is surprisingly difficult to calculate, but this puts the figure of deaths caused by police shootings in the USA at about 1,500 a year rather than the WaPo's 1004 -- half as much again.
It turns out there are two partial databases maintained of people shot by the US police each year
The FBI maintains a list of homicides called the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR), which includes people killed by police and corrections officers. Crucially, the SHR only includes homicides committed by police that in the judgment of the police department or the local FBI have been justified, that is, considered legal. Many people, including members of Congress, have asked the larger question: How many people in total are killed by the police in the United States every year?
Seeking an answer, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2000, requiring the Department of Justice to maintain a list of people killed by police in the United States. The Arrest-Related Deaths program (ARD) was created by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to do this. After several years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) decided to conduct an assessment of the coverage of the Arrest-Related Deaths database. Was this database complete, or did it omit victims?
The BJS faced the same problem looking at the victims of police homicides in the United States that the global human rights community faces when we try to figure out how many people have been killed in Syria’s civil war: we have a number of lists which partially overlap, and which are individually and in sum incomplete. It turns out that there is a statistical technique specifically designed for data of this kind – using multiple, independently collected lists – that can create good estimates of how many people are not on the lists.
I found the
Granta article very interesting, as he takes the reader through the each step of the calculation, explaining the logic very clearly at each stage, with the result that I could follow the reasoning pretty well, and I stopped studying that kind of thing way back when I was 15 or 16.
Anyway, long story short, there are apparently two partical databases maintained (or there were at the time of writing, in 2015), one the FBI and one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Using the correlations from these lists, we conclude that for the eight-year period included in the study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics [2003 through 2009 and 2011 (excluding 2010)] , it is likely that there were approximately 10,000 homicides committed by the police, that is, about 1,250 per year. Keep in mind that the Bureau of Justice Statistics report itself excludes many jurisdictions in the United States that openly refuse to share any data with the FBI. The true number of homicides committed by police is therefore even higher. Though not a true estimate, my best guess of the number of police homicides in the United States is about 1,500 per year.
As I said at the beginning of this article, the estimate of 1,500 police homicides per year would mean that eight to ten per cent of all American homicide victims are killed by the police. Of all American homicide victims killed by people they don’t know, approximately one-third of them are victims of the police.
‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’
granta.com
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www.evernote.com
It's based on this paper:
https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-hrdag-estimating-undoc-homicides.pdf
In either case, the figure is horrifying.