In the decade since Michael Brown Jr.'s death in Ferguson, Missouri, police killings in the U.S. have persisted at a similar rate, according to NBC News' analysis of the Mapping Police Violence database. Annually, from 2013 to 2023, police killings ranged between 1,000 and 1,300. The rate has increased each year from 2019 to 2023, with 2024 on track to continue this trend. Black people, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders have been killed at disproportionately higher rates compared to the general population and whites.
"Police violence hasn't stopped," remarked Sirry Alang, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Despite the social and political attention, there hasn't been a reduction in these incidents.
Michael Brown's killing on August 9, 2014, led to over 11 days of protests in Ferguson, following the death of Eric Garner in New York just three weeks earlier. Both were unarmed Black men. A 2021 study from the University of North Carolina highlighted that Black victims of police killings were less likely to show signs of mental illness, less likely to be armed, and more likely to attempt fleeing than white victims.
The grand jury's decision not to indict the officer who shot Brown, 18, caused significant public outcry. Data since then shows no significant increase in charges against officers. Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University has tracked police-related charges since 2005, noting an uptick in prosecutions but attributed this to multiple officers being charged in single incidents. "Nothing has changed in the past decade in terms of statistically significant change in officers being charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shootings," Stinson said.
The Mapping Police Violence database, maintained by Campaign Zero, shows a rise in police killings, with over 790 reported so far this year, the highest at this point in any year. Another database from The Washington Post corroborates this trend. Experts rely on media-based databases due to the federal government's lack of comprehensive data. The CDC's data lags by years, and the FBI's use-of-force database, created in 2019, depends on voluntary self-reporting and has not released detailed figures.
"We are a country where we can collect data on all kinds of things if we really want to," Alang noted, emphasizing the "huge problem" of the lack of federal data on police violence. The recent shooting of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, by an Illinois sheriff's deputy, who has since been charged with murder, has brought the issue back into the spotlight.
Link: NBCNews
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