The Washington Post newspaper compiled shocking data which shows that the number of people shot by U.S. police per day is over two, more than twice what official reports claim.
During the first five months of this year alone, 385 people were killed, which works out to over 2 per day.
It gets worse though, as the number of black people was disproportionately high among the victims, especially unarmed victims.
The data, collected by an objective third party, contradicts official statistics, which rely on self-reported tallies from law enforcement agencies.
The new tallies show that about 400 people have been killed by police each year since 2008.
While police are allowed to use deadly force when they protect their own lives or the lives of others, there is currently no reliable way of tracking police shooting deaths.
Its clear that in our increasingly connected world, in which everything is logged, tracked and traced, this must change.
It’s even more bizarre that the government relies on self-reported figures from the nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies, which makes the data prone to corruption by police insiders who have vested interests in under reporting the totals.
This year’s homicide rate of almost 2.6 per day is more than double the average 1.1 deaths per day reported in FBI records over the past decade.
“These shootings are grossly underreported,” former police chief Jim Bueermann told the Washington Post. “We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information.”
Some of the report’s other key findings:
