The Stomach-Turning Numbers Behind America’s Police Violence

Data indicate law enforcement officials have killed nearly 500 civilians this year alone.

‘The number of fatal shootings by police officers in the first half of 2017 is nearly identical to the number of shootings recorded during the same time period in 2016 and 2015, according to the Washington Post’s police shootings database.
Police have shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of the year, and authors John Sullivan, Reis Thebault, Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins write that police killings are set to reach 1,000 for the third year in a row. According to the Post’s database, which began in 2015 following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 992 people were killed by law enforcement officers in 2015 and 963 were killed in 2016.
“These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time,” Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, told the Post. “Some places go up, some go down, but it’s averaging out. This is our society in the 21st century.”’
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