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Friday, May 15th, 2020

What the Data Say about Police Shootings

Author:     Lynne Peeples
Source:     Scientific American
Publication Date:     5 September 2019
 Link: What the Data Say about Police Shootings
Stephan:   This article is a year out of date but its descriptions and conclusions still hold, and the data it cites has only gotten worse. There are really two issues here: 1) The incredible violence of the police in the United States, unmatched in any other developed nation in the world. In fact, if you added up the police killings in every European country taken together; it would still only be a fraction of the American total. 2) The wildly disproportionate portion of this violence that is aimed at non-White Americans. Here is some actual data on both aspects of this problem.

On Tuesday 6 August, the police shot and killed a schoolteacher outside his home in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He had reportedly pointed a gun at the officers. In Grants Pass, Oregon, that same day, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed after an altercation with police in the state police office. And in Henderson, Nevada, that evening, an officer shot and injured a 15-year-old suspected of robbing a convenience store. The boy reportedly had an object in his hand that the police later confirmed was not a deadly weapon.

In the United States, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average, a number that’s close to the yearly totals for other wealthy nations. But data on these deadly encounters have been hard to come by.

A pair of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police pushed this reality into the headlines in summer 2014. Waves of public protests broke out after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death by chokehold of Eric Garner in New York City.

Those cases […]

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