Democracy Now

A year-end report from the Mapping Police Violence research project says police killed at least 1,152 people in the United States in 2015. In 14 cities, every single police victim was African-American. Sam Sinyangwe is a policy analyst and data scientist with Campaign Zero and Mapping Police Violence.

Can you talk about these findings? Because there’s been a lot of demand for there even to be data collected in this country around police killings and the racial breakdown of those killings. How did you do this?

SAM SINYANGWE: So, as you mentioned, the federal government, including the FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics and the CDC, do not collect comprehensive data on police killings nationwide. Fortunately, crowd-sourced efforts, such as KilledByPolice.net, FatalEncounters.org, have actually been able to collect the type of comprehensive data needed to do this type of analysis. What we did was merge those data sets, fill in the gaps, identify folks by race, whether they were armed or unarmed, and then make sense of all the data—understand which places were sort of hotspots of police violence and what some of the racial disparities in the data could tell us about how police violence impacts different communities.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this number, both the over 1,115 people killed by police in the last year and also this issue of 14 cities, and explain which are these 14 cities, where the only people that police killed were African-American.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/28/as_chicago_mourns_2_dead_mapping