US police use force on 300,000 people a year, with numbers rising since George Floyd: ‘relentless violence’
US police use force on 300,000 people a year, with numbers rising since George Floyd: ‘relentless violence’
Exclusive: groundbreaking Mapping Police Violence data estimates scale of physical force and civilian injuries
Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.
Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.
The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.
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TBF though, US use of force has been underreported and lacked nationwide statistics for most of the previous decades. If I'm not mistaken, one of the federal agencies who attempted to track it stopped giving annual reports in 2017? Idk I'm kind of fuzzy about that.
The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.
Here's the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: "We can't have an informed discussion, because we don't have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics."
edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings