Sadly, police shooting are on a roll this year. According to a recent report by The Washington Post, a total of 385 people have been killed by law enforcement shootings so far this year, before even hitting the halfway mark of 2015. This averages out to about two killings a day, doubling the amount of police shootings recorded by the federal government in the past ten years.
Utilizing numerous points of data, including police reports, interviews, and local news reports, newspaper rounded up statistics based strictly on death by police shootings. Though a nearly half-and-half split between white victims and victims of color, a striking striking two-thirds of unarmed victims were black or Hispanic. “Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites,” the report reads, with regards to census breakdowns of populations where the shooting took place.
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The majority of victims were recorded between the ages of 25 and 34, with only three officers being charged out of the nearly 400 killings, including the assailants of Walter Scott and Eric Harris. A quarter of the victims were logged as mentally ill, such as Anthony Hill, who was killed during a bipolar episode in Georgia. Former police chief and president of the Washington, D.C. Police Foundation noted that a necessary step in changing the trend is
“These shootings are grossly underreported,” he said. “We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information.”