In case you’ve been under a rock lately, it is becoming quite clear that police in the US can and will kill people, even unarmed people, even on video, and do so with impunity.
The tallying methods, or rather lack thereof, used by both the FBI and individual police departments to count the amount of people killed by police, have been shown to be staggeringly inaccurate.
However, this inability of the government to count the number of people it kills, has been met with multiple alternative means of calculating just how deadly the state actually is.
One of these citizen run databases, is the website http://www.killedbypolice.com. The site is basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.
The tally for 2014? 1,100 people killed by those sworn to protect. That is an average of three people a day. Do not mistake this as saying that those who were killed were innocent. However, when we look at violent crime in this country, we can see that it is at an all time low.
While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.
When we look at citizens killed by police over the last two years, deaths have increased 44 percent in this short time; 763 people were killing by police in 2013.
As a comparison, the total number of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2014 was 58.
Fewer soldiers were killed in war than citizens back home in ‘the land of the free’ in 2014, by a large margin.
So why is that?
This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on January 9th, 2015.
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