How many blacks have been killed by U.S. police? Without official stats, activists track deaths

Number of U.S. blacks killed by police hard to pin down with no official figures

How many blacks have been killed by U.S. police? Without official stats, activists track deaths

By Lauren O’Neil, CBC News Posted: Jul 09, 2016 5:00 AM ETLast Updated: Jul 09, 2016 9:59 AM ET http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/number-of-black-people-killed-by-us-police-still-no-stats-1.3670513

Mapping Police Violence, a comprehensive tracking project for U.S. deaths caused by encounters with police, is one of several well-regarded databases standing in for weak (or non-existent) official government data. (Mappingpoliceviolence.org)

Lauren O’Neil

Lauren O’Neil covers internet culture, digital trends and the social media beat for CBC News. You can get in touch with her on Twitter at @laurenonizzle.

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It’s been nearly two years since the high-profile law enforcement killings of 18-year-old Ferguson, Mo., resident Michael Brown, New York father Eric Garner, and other unarmed black men (or children, in the case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice) sparked months of widespread unrest and calls for police reform across the U.S.

And yet, here we are again as a society in the summer of 2016, still debating and still protesting over the issue of racially motivated brutality.

The back-to-back deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week at the hands of police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota respectively set off a new rash of protests that came to a head in Dallas on Thursday when five police officers were killed by a sniper.

• Why is it so hard to find official data on fatal US police shootings?

Calling for a greater sense of urgency in addressing America’s “broader set of racial disparities,” U.S. President Barack Obama told reporters on Thursday that  blacks were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites last year.

The Guardian, however, pegged the 2015 rate of death for young black men, specifically, as five times higher than white men of the same age.

“More black people were killed by U.S. police in 2015 than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow,” reported Quartz in the wake of Sterling and Castile’s deaths, citing different data from either Obama’s or the Guardian’s. 

“The police are killing people as often as they were before Ferguson,” wrote FiveThirtyEight, pointing to not one but six separate data sources for U.S. police killings. … http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/number-of-black-people-killed-by-us-police-still-no-stats-1.3670513