08 January 2019 :
According to Fatal Encounters, in 2018 the police killed 1810 people.
In 2018, the United States carried out 25 executions.
This means that the police, even before a trial, killed 72 times more people than they were put to death as a result of a judicial procedure.
Fatal Encounters is a website founded and directed by journalist D. Brian Burghart. Burghart describes the site's "mission" as follows: "
I believe in a democracy, citizens should be able to figure out how many people are killed during interactions with law enforcement, why they were killed, and whether training and policies can be modified to decrease the number of officer-involved deaths”.
The site, through a careful press review of minor and local newspapers, has collected in a database the extremes of over 24,000 killings made by the police from 1 January 2000 to today. The authors of the research estimate that the count may not be complete, but in fact Fatal Encounters is today the most complete and reliable source on this topic. In recent years, two other sites, Killed by Police and The Counted, had joined FE in taking account of police victims, but The Counted no longer updates data since December 31, 2016, and Killed by Police is currently only updated until 31 July 2018. For many years, official statistics of people killed by police were contained in the annual crime report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The annual report, called "Crime in the United States" (CIUS), under the heading "justifiable homicides" indicates the murders committed by on duty officers, and, separately, by private citizens for "legitimate defense". The recent work of sites such as FE has brought to light the fact that while CIUS is a reliable source for "normal" killings, it was much less so for police killings, estimated for around half the data for many years.
Returning to the data available on FE, as of 6 January 2019, 1810 victims were listed as killed from January 1 to December 31, 2018. In the coming days there may be updates, but a few units.
Divided by gender, the victims are 1606 males, 189 females, 2 transgender, and 13 whose names and other data have been omitted by the police. Divided by race, the victims are: 649 whites, 377 blacks, Americans of African descent, 240 Hispanics, 23 Native Americans or alaskan, 23 Asian, or Pacific Islands, 1 Middle Eastern and 497 of unspecified origin. Of 133 victims (7.3%) the age is unknown. Of the remaining part, 15 were under 10, 27 between 11 and 16, 59 between 17 and 18, 281 between 19 and 25, 720 between 26 and 40, 464 between 41 and 60, 81 between 60 and 70 years, 20 between 70 and 80 years, and 10 between 81 and 90 years. Overall, 101 of the 1,677 victims whose age is known were underage, 6%.
California is the most populous state in the US, with 38 million inhabitants. Here the police killed 200 people. The other most populous states are Texas (27.5 million, 175 kills), New York (19.3 million, 36 kills, Florida (18.8 million, 125 kills, Illinois (12.8 million, 44 kills), Pennsylvania (12.7 million, 50 kills), Ohio (11.5 million, 71 kills). States that have a high number of killings are also Arizona (6.3 million, 73 kills) and Oklahoma (3.7 million, 71 kills) In proportion to the population, the states with the highest number of police killings are Oklahoma (1/52,000), Arizona (1/86,000), Florida (1/150,000), Texas (1/157,000) and California (1/190,000).They are all states in which the death penalty is in force.
