The US federal government doesn’t track the number of people shot each year by police, according to this Washington Post article from last September.
That didn’t sit well with The Guardian, which launched an investigative project, called The Counted, to fix that oversight.
The question of who counts and whom is counted is not simply a matter of numbers. It’s also about power; the less of it you have the less say you have in what makes it to the ledger and what form it takes when it gets there … We think those who have been killed matter; a handful of these deaths make national headlines while the rest barely make a ripple beyond their own families and communities. The data is important. But they are not statistics; they are people. To record their deaths, particularly when the circumstances of those deaths are in dispute, marks a small but important step in the attempt to restore their humanity – albeit posthumously.
At the beginning of June, the website published an article (which contains the above quote) and an interactive database with a lot of alarming statistics.
You can read some of them after the jump.
Of the 494 people killed by police so far in 2015:
● 431 died of gunshot wounds
● 107 were unarmed
● 80 of those killings occurred in California
● 6 killings happened in Oregon
The database includes several filtering options, and the victim profiles include pictures and a description of the circumstances surrounding their deaths.
It’s definitely worth exploring.
The Washington Post at the end of May published this article that offers slightly different statistics, though the gist is the same:
● The vast majority of victims — more than 80 percent — were armed with potentially lethal objects, primarily guns, but also knives, machetes, revving vehicles and, in one case, a nail gun.
● Forty-nine people had no weapon, while the guns wielded by 13 others turned out to be toys. In all, 16 percent were either carrying a toy or were unarmed.
● Ninety-two victims — nearly a quarter of those killed — were identified by police or family members as mentally ill.
● Although race was a dividing line, those who died by police gunfire often had much in common. Most were poor and had a history of run-ins with law enforcement over mostly small-time crimes, sometimes because they were emotionally troubled.
While clearly police often find themselves in situations where use of force is the only option, as Jim Bueermann, a former police chief says in the article cited above, police shootings in the US are “grossly underreported,” and tracking the data is the first step in reducing the number of people killed by cops.
•Heart disease: 611,105
•Cancer: 584,881
•Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 149,205
•Accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557
•Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,978
•Alzheimer’s disease: 84,767
•Diabetes: 75,578
•Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,979
•Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 47,112
•Intentional self-harm (suicide): 41,149
Full year data for 2013 for the United States
Just to lend a little perspective. No, I don’t think police killings are automatically justified. But if someone is pointing a toy gun at you, how long are you going to wait to find out?
How many cops have been killed and/or attacked and had to defend themselves.
@Jimmy Carter: Yeah totally! The next time a little kid walks up to you and goes “Bang! Bang!” with his squirt gun, you should just blow him away! After all, he clearly has murder on his mind.
Cops are bad. Rent is really more than I want to pay to live in the nice neighborhoods. Repeat. Add: Motorist’s fault.
There is a vast spectrum of possibilities between a “little kid” with a squirt gun, and a twenty-five year old with an air soft gun that has removed the orange tip and just done a robbery of a Circle K. The point is that saying the gun was a “toy” adds very little to help in determining whether or not the shooting was justified. Each circumstance is unique. Is there a valid debate as to whether there are too many police involved shootings? Absolutely. There is also a valid debate as to whether there needs to be more done about heart disease and cancer. But the Mercury spends much more time on the former than the latter. Probably because it is more sensationalistic, and they believe that will generate more profit for their business, which is an entirely valid proposition. But because they focus on it doesn’t make it more important in the larger scheme of life.
If you like comparisons: in Britain, which has about 20% of the population of the US, there have been 4 people killed by the police in the last 5 years. Total.
Of course, Britain is one of the few countries where the police don’t carry guns, but that shouldn’t matter because guns make us safer, right?
I already did this work a year ago. And they missed the most distinctive demographic. I’d give them a C-.
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/so…