Since protesters rose up in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown, cops in America have killed more than 2,000 people.
The count comes from Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit that’s tracked police shootings by collecting reports from the media, public, and law enforcement and verifying them through news reports. Some of the data is incomplete, with details about a victim’s race, age, and other factors sometimes missing. It also includes killings that were potentially legally justified, and is likely missing some killings entirely.
The project, similar to others maintained by the Guardian and Washington Post, is necessary due to a massive gap in the information we have about police shootings in America. The FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics are each supposed to track police killings. But a 2015 study by RTI International found that each agency misses nearly half of police killings in the US, and together they still miss more than one quarter.
Fatal Encounters seeks to remedy our gap in knowledge as police shootings — and the vast racial disparities behind them — get more attention in the news. For this story, we’ve pulled some of that data to break down the demographics of this population and some of their personal information.
More white people are killed by police in raw numbers, but black people are disproportionately likely to be killed
Continue reading...http://www.vox.com/a/police-shootings-deaths
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