Police Killings in U.S. Rise!

The number of people killed by the police has risen every year since the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

You might reasonably ask, “How can this be? I thought the nation had been working on reducing the high number (compared to every other democratic society in the world) of police-related killings?” It’s a good question.

It is also a question that I have attempted to answer for the past decade. It is a difficult problem to solve because it involves so many factors: proliferation of guns, the culture of American policing, union protections, initial and in-service training, and leadership throughout the ranks of our nation’s police agencies. Complex for sure. Intractable?… perhaps.

In spite of a major focus on this problem, federal consent decrees in 15 or more American cities, and an unprecedented national focus and public protest on police use of deadly force, the number of deaths in police custody have actually INCREASED! And yet the federal government still does not record these data. Thankfully, journalists have done so during the past decade and this report comes from journalism and not from our government..

Here’s a data-based deep-dive into the problem:

It comes rom today’s article by Steven RichTim Arango and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and graphics by Daniel Wood.

“After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved fatal to those in custody.

“Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.

Since George Floyd’s Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling

Racial disparities in police killings persist

[Sources: Analysis of data compiled by The Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence. Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2020).]

“Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, ‘I can’t breathe…’

“Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Mr. Floyd’s famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments around the country, especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson’s death)…”

Please read the full article HERE and the audio below.