By Kimberly Kindy,
and reported by Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, Steven Rich, Keith L. Alexander and Wesley Lowery
In
an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding in a stolen
car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police opened fire on a gun-wielding
moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an
elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay. Douglas
Harris, 77, answered the door with a gun.
The three are among at least 385 people shot and
killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more
than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than
twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over
the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete.
“These shootings are grossly underreported,” said Jim
Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the Washington-based Police
Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving law enforcement.
“We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin
to accurately track this information.”
A national debate is raging about police
use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and how
often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of
every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by
gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked exclusively at shootings, not
killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.
Using interviews, police reports, local news accounts
and other sources, The Post tracked more than a dozen details about each
killing through Friday, including the victim’s race, whether the person was
armed and the circumstances that led to the fatal encounter. The result is an
unprecedented examination of these shootings, many of which began as minor
incidents and suddenly escalated into violence.
Among The Post’s findings:
● About half the victims were white, half minority. But
the demographics shifted sharply among the unarmed victims, two-thirds of whom
were black or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of
whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census
tracts where the shootings occurred.
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