Police killed more than 1000 people this year

Police in the United States killed at least 1,152 people in the United States this year through Dec. 15, with the 60 largest police departments disproportionately killing black people, according to data compiled by activists who run the Mapping Police Violence project, according to Business Insider.

The group said most police departments did not provide numbers on officer-involved fatalities, so its data comes from three crowdsourced databases: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net as well as research through media, social media, obituaries, police reports and other sources.

Forty percent of people killed by police in the country's 60 biggest police departments were black, while the African-American population in those jurisdictions was 20 percent, the report said.

The group, formed by data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe and activists Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson, said the 2015 figure compares with 1,172 last year and 1,140 in 2013. The group says it believes its database reflects 90-98 percent of police killings since 2013.

The project compiles data on all fatal uses of force by the police, including gunshot, asphyxiation, vehicles and Tasers. It includes unintentional killings such as people who died of a medical emergency while being arrested or restrained, and off-duty incidents.

Police killings, especially of black people, have sparked protests in a number of U.S. cities over the last year and a half.

The report said the police departments with the highest rates of police killings per capita were those of Bakersfield, California; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Oakland, California; Long Beach, California; New Orleans, and San Francisco. Also included in this group were the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

The report also said charges against police officers who do use deadly force are very rare and that police use of lethal force is not correlated to violent crime rates. The study also said 33 percent of black people killed by police were unarmed, compared with 18 percent of white victims.

Source: MENA