Police have
killed over 1,000 people in 2015, and about 20 percent of those
killed were completely unarmed.
As of Monday
evening, U.S. police had killed 1,024 people since the start of the
year, according to The Counted, a continuously updated database of
U.S. police killings maintained by The Guardian. Of the total, 203
victims of police were unarmed.
In November
alone police killed 10 unarmed males, including Jamar Clark, the
24-year-old man whose death led to in ongoing protests in
Minneapolis, and Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old who was shot by police
in Louisiana during a chase. (Body camera footage showed that the two
officers involved in Mardis’ death fired recklessly into the car
driven by Chris Few, the boy’s father, who was also injured in the
incident. The two officers have been arrested.)
Despite
claims America’s police forces need to be highly armed in order to
defend themselves against a “war on cops,” just 34 police were
fatally shot and three others died of assault in the line of duty so
far this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which
tracks police deaths in the United States.
Barring a
sudden spate of violence in the final days of this year, police
killings appear to be down from 2014, when 47 police were fatally
shot in the line of duty. Radley Balko, a criminal justice blogger at
the Washington Post, argued that the raw data on police fatalities is
deceptive and makes this line of work seem even more dangerous than
it really is. In a comparison of the number of dead officers to the
total population, he noted that, “by this measure 2015 is shaping
up to be the second safest year for police ever, after 2013.”
The data
provided by projects such as The Counted is crucial because the
federal government does not keep a comprehensive database of police
killings. In October, The Guardian compared crowd-sourced data like
their database with the FBI’s official data on police killings in
2014, and found that several widely-reported victims of police
violence were missing from the FBI’s data, including Eric Garner,
Tamir Rice and John Crawford. Of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies
in the U.S., only 224 reported data to the FBI.
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