December 29, 2020

Fatal Police Shootings Have Been Flat Over the Past Five Years

My Twitter feed has been full of arguments today about police shootings of suspects. I’m not sure why, but it’s as good a reason as any to go ahead and show how it’s changed over the past few years. Short answer: according to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database, it hasn’t:

It’s true that police shootings of unarmed suspects have declined considerably in the years since Ferguson. And that’s good! However, the overall number of shootings has been flat, and the huge overrepresentation of Black suspects killed has been flat too. That’s a lot less good.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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