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damnedifIknow

(3,183 posts)
Mon Aug 10, 2015, 05:33 PM Aug 2015

Police killings since Ferguson, in one map

Samuel DuBose, Freddie Gray, and Jessica Hernandez are just three of at least 1,091 people killed by police since August 9, 2014, the day of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit, has tracked these killings 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.

Vox’s Soo Oh created an interactive map with data from Fatal Encounters. It shows some of the killings by law enforcement since the Brown shooting:

A huge majority of the 1,091 deaths on the map are from gunshots, which is hardly surprising given that guns are so deadly compared with other tools used by police. There are also a lot of noticeable fatalities from vehicle crashes, stun guns, and asphyxiations. In some cases, people died from stab wounds, medical emergencies, and what’s called “suicide by cop,” when people kill themselves by baiting a police officer into using deadly force.

The FBI already collects some of this data from local and state agencies, but as Vox’s Dara Lind explained, that data is very limited. Reporting homicides for participating agencies is mandatory, but reporting the circumstances of homicides is not. So we might know that thousands of people die in a certain state, but we won’t always know why those homicides happened and whether they involved police. Participation in the FBI reporting programs is also voluntary, making the number of reported homicides in the federal data at best a minimum of what’s going on across the country."

http://www.vox.com/a/police-shootings-ferguson-map

11 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Police killings since Ferguson, in one map (Original Post) damnedifIknow Aug 2015 OP
Thank you for posting this dragonfly301 Aug 2015 #1
About 350 were black. About 850 were not. Comrade Grumpy Aug 2015 #2
Those are inconvenient numbers melman Aug 2015 #8
12% of the population makes up 29% of those killed. Black lives matter. Gravitycollapse Aug 2015 #9
But also significantly more than 29% of the homicides, and I suspect crime in general. N.T. Donald Ian Rankin Aug 2015 #10
Let me argue my point more clearly... Gravitycollapse Aug 2015 #11
Wow 7 police killings from my state of Indiana. B Calm Aug 2015 #3
Circumstances matter. Igel Aug 2015 #4
the WaPo's database provides much more info hfojvt Aug 2015 #5
Here are details of the two police shootings in Alaska Blue_In_AK Aug 2015 #6
350/(350+850) = 0.29 1939 Aug 2015 #7

Gravitycollapse

(8,155 posts)
11. Let me argue my point more clearly...
Tue Aug 11, 2015, 05:42 AM
Aug 2015

I'm not contesting the crime statistics. I'm pointing out at least two things:

A. Black criminality is more severely punished than white criminality.

B. Black people are more likely to be the target of excessive and unnecessary police force than white people.


This leads me to my original conclusion. Which is that black lives matter. In other words, the lives of black people are of equal importance to everyone else. And they assuredly do not deserve to suffer under inequitable police enforcement simply because of the color of their skin.

Igel

(35,282 posts)
4. Circumstances matter.
Mon Aug 10, 2015, 06:20 PM
Aug 2015

It's why a lot of the data is subject to misinterpretation.

There's a difference between
somebody shot, unarmed, because the cop was scared
somebody shot because the cop was ducking his bullets and was scared
somebody who died from suicide in a cell
somebody who died from a heart condition in a cell
somebody who was a civilian and was shot during an offender-initiated shootout

The first shouldn't happen. It's a "police killing."
The second is totally justified. It's a "police killing."
The third happens: If you suspect the suspect is suicidal, you watch, otherwise you don't. It's not a "police killing." But it's in the database because it's a death during or involving police contact.
The fourth also happens: Some things you can't anticipate. It's not a "police killing." But it's in the database because it's a death during or involving police contact, even if the police aren't involved in any way.
The fifth also happens, even if the only police involvement was just showing up in response to a call.

1939

(1,683 posts)
7. 350/(350+850) = 0.29
Mon Aug 10, 2015, 07:27 PM
Aug 2015

29% of those who die as a result of police actions are black versus ??13%?? of the population. Sounds about what you would expect.

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