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Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years

Author:     Jamiles Lartey
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Tue 9 Jun 2015 06.00 EDT
 Link: By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years
Stephan:   Perhaps because the majority of Americans have never been outside the borders of the United States, they simply have no idea how radically different the police murder rate in this country is from other nations. If you are a male, and a person of color, your chance of being murdered by the police is vastly greater than that of a White man of your age. You don't have to be doing anything. Being in a public place or street while Black is enough. But it also has to be said that more Whites than people of color are killed by police, in absolute numbers, as opposed to proportional to your race's percentage of population. What does that tell us? It tells us that the police murder more people regardless of race in days than are killed in some nations over decades. Here are the facts.
Police kill map in the U.S. Credit: The Guardian

The Guardian has built the most comprehensive database of US police killing ever published. Compare our findings to those from the UK, Australia, Iceland and beyond.

It’s rather difficult to compare data from different time periods, according to different methodologies, across different parts of the world, and still come to definitive conclusions.

But now that we have built The Counted, a definitive record of people killed by police in the US this year, at least there is some accountability in America – even if data from the rest of the world is still catching up.

It is undeniable that police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait, and one that resonates with protests that have gone global since a killing last year in Ferguson, Missouri: the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared […]

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