SINCE THE DEATH of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, attention has been riveted on the issue of police brutality.
Pundits were shocked to discover no national oversight of local police departments—and no national database of persons killed by law enforcement officers.
On August 15, an article in USA Today cited FBI estimates of 400 police-involved deaths a year. But, it went on to note, those estimates were based on a small fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide—those that chose to report “justifiable” police homicides.
Frankly, we’re more interested in police homicides that are not justifiable. Who keeps that list?
For more than a dozen years, Wikipedia has crowd-sourced a list of deaths caused by US law enforcement officers. Last month, we collaborated with 44 “Wikipedians”—the highly involved, active volunteers at the heart of Wikipedia—to source, distill, and verify a comprehensive-as-possible list of people killed by US law enforcement officers in August 2014, and add to the existing list for prior months and years. Names were culled from thousands of mainstream media articles. Each case was confirmed in at least one media source, often the paper of record for its community.
The total for August alone? One hundred and four deaths.