News / Human Rights

US police fatally shot nearly 1,000 people in 2015: Report

Monday, 28 December 2015 2:44 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 28 December 2015 5:58 PM ]

Demonstrators protest the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald on December 24, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. (AFP photo)

Police in the United States fatally shot nearly 1,000 people in 2015, of which 90 were unarmed and did not possess weapons of any kind during a confrontation, according to a report.

The great majority of people who died at the hands of police were either suicidal, had a mental illness or were wielding weapons, a year-long study by the Washington Post has found.

The Post sought to gather a record of every fatal police encounter in the nation in 2015, a project that began after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

The Post’s database was compiled from interviews, police reports, local news accounts and other sources. No government agency maintains a complete list of police killings.

The FBI is charged with keeping statistics on such deaths, but a Post analysis of FBI data showed that fewer than half of the nation’s 18,000 police departments report fatal police shootings to the agency.

The FBI and the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics now acknowledge that their data collection has been deeply flawed.

Police killings, especially of African Americans, have sparked protests in cities across the US over the past two years.

Protesters stand outside the Edward A. Garmatz US Courthouse in Baltimore during a march for Freddie Gray in April. Gray died a week after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody. (AP photo)

According to data compiled by an activist group, US police have killed 1,152 people as of December 15 of this year, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans.

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, according to activists that run the Mapping Police Violence project.

More than three times as many police officers are facing murder or manslaughter charges this year for on-duty shootings than in any other year over the past decade, according to a researcher.

An average of five police officers annually faced such charges from 2005 through 2014, but this year alone, at least 16 officers have been charged with either murder or manslaughter, said Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminologist who tracks police killings.

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