Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide

[Chicago1980]

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Source: The Washington Post

By Kimberly Kindy, and reported by Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, Steven Rich, Keith L. Alexander and Wesley Lowery
May 30 at 9:00 PM

In an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding in a stolen car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police opened fire on a gun-wielding moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay. Douglas Harris, 77, answered the door with a gun.

The three are among at least 385 people shot and killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete.

“These shootings are grossly under­reported,” said Jim Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the Washington-based Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving law enforcement. “We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information.”

A national debate is raging about police use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shootings-in-2015-approaching-400-nationwide/2015/05/30/d322256a-058e-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?hpid=z1

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They so often bark orders and demand respect, but they don't seem to respect the rights of the people. They're so trigger happy and seeming fearful for their lives. Being a cop isn't easy, but they sign up knowing that the job will be tough, stressful, and dangerous.

Are the police scared of the public or should the public be scared of the police?

[jtuck004]

1. "according to a Washington Post analysis." < I like this. These are all the "killings" they could

find, presumably? There is no requirement for a national or even consistent state reporting, no standard.

There are jurisdictions where you can be shot and hung and determined to be a suicide and, perhaps with no name, disposed of. And if they don't respect you, it can be worse. That's why some of those old thriller movies are so scary. They have some basis in reality.

But at least we know about these.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. The problem is endemic in crime statistics.

More rapes and assaults of all kinds are committed than are reported, and of those that are reported, some are dismissed as unsubstantiated.

What the WP is doing here is probably a very good thing, as long as they don't have an agenda that corrupts the methodology. It would be really great if they also compiled all deaths while in LE hands. That would at least make the cops go to greater lengths to conceal their misdeeds.

[jtuck004]

3. So rapists and robbers aren't given nearly unlimited social and financial support to bully and

murder the citizenry into submission, so I don't equate the two in any sense. The first are accountable to someone else - the people we pay are accountable to us.

As long as we don't pretend this is anything more than a newspaper story, that's fine. But unless they used the resources of the federal government and did an on the ground analysis of every municipality in the nation, this is just a guess. They didn't.

It probably doesn't count the ones where someone is abducted in the middle of the night and then a body is found hanging later, those sorts of stories.

These are polite statistics.

Lots to look at out there, not being touched. A thousand thousand "Fergusons". But no profit in justice, sometimes, I guess.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

4. Yeehaw!!!!!

Let's get tough on crime

[Sunlei]

5. "killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody." Include these thousands!!

[TexasTowelie]

6. Locking thread.

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"The three are among at least 385 people shot and killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis."

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