A Guardian project that's compiling killings by US police says we're right on track to hit more than 1,000 such deaths by year's end, because we've already hit the midpoint. The newspaper's The Counted project, an interactive database that the Guardian says uses both reporting and confirmed crowdsourced info, indicates 500 people have already died at the hands of police in 2015, after two black men in New York and Cincinnati were shot this week. These numbers are more than double the latest rate compiled by the FBI (461 in 2013), which manages a "voluntary" reporting system where police agencies can send in numbers of "justified homicides." In those first 500 deaths, 49.6% of the individuals were white, 28.2% were black, and 14.8% were Hispanic/Latino. Only 4.8% were women.
How that stacks up against America's makeup: As of the 2013 census, we were 62.6% white, 13.2% black, and 17.1% Hispanic/Latino. And there's a definite imbalance among those who were unarmed: Per the paper's stats, 30.5% of black people were unarmed, while just 16.1% of white people were (the unarmed total is 108 of the 500). The executive director of Amnesty International USA told the Guardian earlier this month that the "startling" disparity between unarmed blacks and unarmed whites shows we need to "get to the bottom of why you're twice as likely to be shot if you're an unarmed black male." You can explore the database and learn more about the dead here. (More police stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
