Police Brutality Statistics: US Police Killings to Reach 1,100 by 2015's End: Report
A new report revealed staggering statistics about the number of unarmed African Americans who have been killed by police officers in 2015.
According to The Counted, a project that tracked every death caused by law enforcement in the U.S. this year, 547 people had been killed by the end of June. When broken down, the data showed that 478 of those people were fatally shot, while 31 died after being shocked by a taser, 16 died after being struck by police vehicles and 19 after some sort of altercation occured while in police custody.
If the rate of killings by police in the United States continues at this pace, then this will result in 1,100 fatalities by the end of this year, according to an investigation by The Guardian. It also found an average of three people were killed each day during the first half of 2015.
When identifying demographics, the totals indicate that police killed black people at more than twice the rate of whites and Latinos. Plus, black people who were killed by police were significantly more likely to have been unarmed.
Brittany Packnett, an activist who was selected to be part of Barack Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said the disproportionate killing of unarmed black Americans is "appalling."
"It is something we should be deeply ashamed of and committed to changing urgently because it is very literally a life-or-death situation for so many people, and many of those people look like me," Packnett said.
"We live in a time and space that dictates that if we can't prove it with data, then it didn't happen. And yet we know that people are continuing to suffer in these ways every single day, so we have to make sure we have the numbers to back up people's stories and that those numbers push police departments towards urgent action," she added.
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