"People killed by police in the US"

[handmade34]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#

What is The Counted?

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists as frequently and as promptly as possible......

[truedelphi]

1. It is so good to realize that across the pond, these journalists

Are going to try and impact the death count of those killed by police.

And it is especially difficult work as the local media invariably hides the truth about various incidents. We had a young woman on her way to work and she was killed by a cop who decided to cowboy up and speed across the County in order to join a police chase that would have been over by the time he got there anyway.

The story barely mentioned how she died. You would have thought she had an aneurysm and died on account of it, rather than one of our men in blue driving so very recklessly.

[Hydra]

2. Gotta support our "troops"

Or all social order will immediately collapse!

[dreamnightwind]

3. Unbelievable it had to come to this, but great they are doing it

There can be no excuse for the government not doing this. We had Obama for 8 years and Holder for most of that, still no official count? Any reason the federal governmet can't do this? Sees like something we would want from the U.S. Justice Department.

[Igel]

7. Yes.

Congress has the reporting voluntary. Mostly because they don't control local police forces and really have no good way of mandating and enforcing obligatory reporting.

The second bit is that federal law enforcement is exempted from the requirement. They show up in figures when they're involved in local enforcement and the local police force reports.

The problem is that there's monitoring and then there's politicization and manipulation based on scant understanding. The original goal was monitoring: What's happening? Most of the calls now are for manipulation and don't seek understanding but to play "gotcha."

The numbers would be useful, but unless the first goal is to understand each situation in its full context, the numbers just serve partisan, particular goals. Lots of sound and fury, but it's unclear what it all actually signifies because we can't ever get past the sound and fury. Now we focus on overall numbers without understanding where they come from, now we focus on numbers by cohort, now on individuals, now on individual locations--without worrying about what's counted, how the numbers are expected to vary by cohort, with zero-tolerance attitudes towards other humans, and not understanding that random doesn't mean "uniformly distributed."

So the overall numbers include those who die of causes unrelated to police while in custody; this skews the numbers towards those who are older and the demographics of those in prison and jails. Reporting isn't uniform, with a lot of smaller, less urban districts not reporting, and this skews the demographics. Cohorts matter, because different groups differ by in-group and out-group homicide and assault rates, and people are sensitive to that kind of statistical information and use it in evaluating risks. Accidents and mistakes happen. And we always take above-median incidences as meaningful, even though random distributions tend to be lumpy--this is a real problem in, say, looking at cancer "hot spots". The famous chrome VI related industrial contamination case from a couple of decades ago (a movie was made out of it, the woman champion of the community was famous) was ultimately found to be very likely random, for instance, however counterintuitive that may have been. People suck at probabilities and statistics.

The result when there's a lot of data is that we use the data that suit our motivations. Now an emotional individual case, sans all the relevant information; now per capita stats for a group; now the absolute numbers for some other purpose.

[dreamnightwind]

8. We still to need to get the numbers out there

I realize things are often more complex than they seem, and will be used by people to suit their purposes. It is always such, yet the public deserves to have these figures. Over time there will be an ability to access trend lines to get relevant perspectives, at first we'll just have to learn how to process the info as best we can.

I had assumed the federal Justice Department would have some authority as far as mandating the collection and reporting of office-involved deaths, and if not, that they could do it themselves. Sounds like you are saying the Justice Department's hands are tied on this? Perhaps a good place for activists to push for legislation then?

[left-of-center2012]

4. Wyoming?

Second place with only 3?

[Igel]

5. Change it from "per capita" to the actual count.

Per capita's a better measurement sometimes, it's a rate instead of a count. If you have a small population, "3" is more than "50" with a much larger population.

We expect, all things being equal, really populous states to have more examples. CA, TX, FL are populous states.

[Igel]

6. Good, in that they're using largely the same definition that law enforcement uses.

It means that the numbers can be not unreasonably compared. Those included are those who died from police contact.

The official numbers are during some official police business while in pursuit. The Guardian's number includes traffic accidents unrelated to this. So if a policeman makes a turn and hits somebody, the Guardian's listing it. The official tally in the US will just list it if the policeman was in pursuit of a suspect or responding to a call.

It would also be sort of cool if the Guardian had a bit more granularity. If it also broke out armed/unarmed confrontations, for example. In some ways, break out by age group is even more useufl--if you look at crime reports there's a fair gap in criminality by age, those over 60 not being a big contributing factor and those under 25 contributing quite a bit.