As 2015 concluded, various organizations attempted to accurately document the number of killings committed by on-duty cops across the country during the previous 12 months. Some, such as the Washington Post, tabulated the number of civilian casualties at 965, The Guardian figures were 1136, killedbypolice.net rounded the numbers to an even 1200 and fatalencounters.org tallied 1280 killings. Keep in mind that much police misconduct remains undocumented, each agency utilizes different methods of accounting and these killings are only the reported killings, so the actual number of killings can very easily can be several hundred higher.
Published FBI data indicates less than 50 percent of the 18,000 police departments in the U.S. properly report their findings to the agency. The Washington Post documented well over twice as many lethal police confrontations than the average annual number reported by the FBI over the past decade.
“The FBI will replace its current program with a near real-time database to be made public by 2017,” claims senior FBI official, Stephen L. Morris, whose division collects crime data. “We are responding to a real human outcry … People want to know what police are doing, and they want to know why they are using force.”
Funded by taxpayers, police often forget they are public servants who are hired to enforce the laws, as well as protect and serve their communities. The thin line between criminal and hero becomes blurred when some cops ignore these facts.
As a reminder, more and more police activities are being video recorded, and modern technology heightens awareness about police terrorism. The current era of body, cellphone and dashboard cameras, along with local surveillance equipment, provides damaging digital evidence that can immediately “go viral” on the Internet for millions to witness, thus, allowing potential jurors the luxury of examining the footage beforehand. Increasingly, this availability has helped secure more indictments against cops.
“Thank God for technology,” said the Rev. Ira Acree, pastor at Greater St. John Bible Church in Chicago, where, in November, a cop was charged with first-degree murder. “Maybe it’s finally helping us crack the blue code of silence.”
According to the Washington Post, 6 percent of police killings were captured by body cameras, and more than half of the departments refused requests to release footage.
The Guardian revealed that young Black men were nine times more likely to be killed by cops than anyone else last year, and that one in every 65 deaths of African-American men between 15 and 34 was caused by police, and that Black men comprised 15 percent of all police killing victims in 2015, but only 2 percent of the U.S. population.
Nationally, approximately 25 percent of African-Americans killed by police were unarmed, compared with approximately 17 percent for their Caucasian counterparts. At least 27 percent of those killed by police were suffering from mental illness, and instead of being treated, they were murdered.
“Often they have an edged weapon, like a knife, and when officers start yelling, ‘Drop it! Drop it!’ that will not calm them down,” explained Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based police think tank. “Instead, it increases their anxiety.”
A number of cop killings were classified as suicides, causing much skepticism.
“We have a tremendous problem,” said Dr. Daniel Reidenberg, the managing director of the National Council for Suicide Prevention. “In a society where firearms are as prevalent as they are, and where people know law enforcement are trained to respond to a certain situation in a certain way, we have a problem.”
Some psychologists contend the epidemic of police killings would be considered genocide if it were occurring overseas, and that most Black men are one police stop away from becoming a hashtag memorial.
According to reports, the situations that have caused mass nationwide unrest occur most often when Caucasian cops kill unarmed Black males, such as Michael Brown or Tamir Rice. These incidents represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.
These reports suggest that most police terrorism victims fit one of three categories: they ran when confronted by cops, they were mentally ill or suicidal or they were wielding weapons.
Unarmed Black men in the U.S. are killed by cops at a disproportionately higher rate than their Caucasian counterparts. Although Black men are only approximately 6 percent of this country’s total population, records show that they were 40 percent of the unarmed men killed by cops last year.
Ethnicity notwithstanding, more than 25 percent of the fatal confrontations occurred when victims either ran or drove away from cops. In three-quarters of the fatal shootings, police were under attack or defending someone who was.
Although police rarely face criminal charges in fatal encounters, their indictments more than tripled last year. Over the past decade, an average of five cops annually have faced criminal charges for on-duty activities. In 2015, 18 cops, of approximately 1,000 who killed, were charged with felonies ranging from reckless discharge of a firearm to manslaughter to murder, compared with 47 between 2005 and 2014. This number is actually more than three times as many indictments in any previous year. Only 11 out of 65 cops charged in fatal shootings over the past decade were convicted.
For 55 cops involved in fatal shootings last year, it wasn’t their first time
