29 December 2015 — FAIR
WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count

The lead image of the Washington Post‘s report on 965 people killed by police in 2015 isn’t of any of the victims, but of one of the killer cops: Lisa Meakle, a Pennsylvania officer acquitted of manslaughter for killing an unarmed David Kassick. (photo: Dan Gleiter/AP)
Concerned that official records undercount the number of people shot and killed by police in the United States every year, the Washington Post (12/26/15) attempted to compile a list of every fatal police shooting in 2015. The paper found nearly a thousand such cases—more than twice as many as the FBI reports in a typical year.
The Post‘s project—which corroborates a similar tally conducted by the British Guardian (6/9/15)—is a journalistic accomplishment, as well as an achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has worked to call attention to police violence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Continue reading →
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