they did an incredible job here, very well done UI easy to filter and educate yourself.
The saddest story I found:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/autistic-6-year-old-shot-killed-...
Investigation: Police Shootings
11–20 of 221 posts
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#12I find this discrepancy very interesting, only ~4% of the people shot and killed by police were female. Police departments are male dominate and maybe this factors into the difference[0] Male - 952 Female - 41 Why such a discrepancy? I don't think males are 23x more dangerous than females. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_law_enforcement
Between 1980 and 2008 "Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90.5% of the total number of offenders" [1]. Men are much more dangerous. A general rule for a lost child is to seek out a friendly looking woman, since she would be much more likely to help and not harm the child [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime [2] http://gavindebecker.com/resources/child_safety/its_every_pa...
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#13Number of people killed last year by police in England and Wales: 3. That's the highest since 2008. [1]
Why doesn't law enforcement seem to care? The government doesn't even track police shootings (one reason the Washington Post created its database) and, generally, law enforcement's reaction expresses no concern for the victims or for reducing this appalling behavior and widespread failure.
[1] http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/fatal-police-shootings
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
93 victims were unarmed, 33 were armed with a toy, and 27 unknown. That is a lot more than Americans killed by terrorists in US.
For me, this highlights how overblown the terrorist problem is.
About 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. That's about ~400,000 Americans killed by other Americans in their cars since the 2001 terrorist attacks. It's pretty clear that the emotional appeal is what people seem to care about ("someone wants to kill us") and it has absolutely nothing to do at all with Americans dying.
Terrorism has never been a problem. The same number of people died in car accidents during September 2001 as they did in terrorist attacks. Where is our war on cars? Oh, nobody cares about that, cars are freedom, cars are what we went to war to protect.
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#15The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#16Some notes: * The Guardian has a very similar feature, "The Counted": http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0... The Guardian's feature is better in some ways; for instance, it attempts to account for all police engagement fatalities, not just shootings. Some of the worst police abuses in the US haven't involved guns, and if you read the data carefully you learn some surprising things, like how d…
And additional data going back to 2013: http://killedbypolice.net/
That's a great resource. Multiple links for every death, very impressive.
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#17The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts
More than 10% of US people live in California. So 1/10 of the total doesn't really stand out.
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#18Some notes: * The Guardian has a very similar feature, "The Counted": http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0... The Guardian's feature is better in some ways; for instance, it attempts to account for all police engagement fatalities, not just shootings. Some of the worst police abuses in the US haven't involved guns, and if you read the data carefully you learn some surprising things, like how d…
93 victims were unarmed, 33 were armed with a toy, and 27 unknown. That is a lot more than Americans killed by terrorists in US.
Not a lot more: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-shooting-terrorism-g.... About 30 terrorism-related deaths per year, not counting 9/11. If 9/11 is a once-every-50 year sort of event, that's another 60 per year on average.
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#19FWIW (a alot, IMHO), here is the Github account for the data:
https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings
Seems like no big deal but with the commit history, we basically have a record and frequency count of how, in a major project by a major news organization, things get updated. Counting these incidents has always been difficult. Victims names are rarely known at the time of death, nevermind the circumstances. It can take awhile for that information to come out and when it does, often a reporter (at a local newspaper) will have moved on to some other story.
The Wapo team is dependent on local reports. The github repo let's us see how efficient they are at it. Very cool transparent move on their part.
Re: Investigation: Police Shootings
#20The state by state numbers are surprising. CA has about 1/10th of the total shootings. IL has only 20, which is less than a lot of other states (NM for example). Florida and Texas seem to be the other big standouts
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