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.
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Super Opinionated.
