LETTER: The number of people being killed by police is steadily increasing

By Tom O’Connell, MD

That Wikipedia has been systematically aggregating data on people killed by American police agencies from jurisdictions all over the country was completely unknown to me quite until recently; I’m not sure how I came to discover the site (or how Wikipedia has been maintaining it) but its versimilitude is attested to by the accuracy of the html links supplied with every entry. Please see below.

I’ve been digging in to the report for a couple of weeks to the exclusion of most other activities and can tell you that the more you dig, the more you be offended by what’s happening.

A major disappointment for me was discovering what a large percentage of readers and TV viewers who were moved to comment on the various stories are both adamantly “pro police” and inclined to be contemptuous of those who dare disagree with them.

The sheer number of people being killed seems to be increasing steadily; late summer seems to be the deadliest time. August 2014 was the first “triple digit month and Michael Brown was an archetype: young, black and vulnerable. Compare him with the infamous Trayvon Martin vigilante killing in Florida.

The victims reported by Wikipedia were not all young or people of color; the oldest was 95 and a few were over 70. What was almost constant was the formulaic jargon in the news reports: “officer shooting” is inevitably used as synonymous with “killed by cops,” and the situations described often strain credulity and call for a better explanation of why it was necessary to resort to deadly force so early in the encounter– or indeed, at all.

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List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States

Listed below are lists of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion in the lists implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The listing merely documents the occurrence of a death.

The lists below are incomplete, as the annual average number of justifiable homicides alone is estimated to be near 400.[1] Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the FBI does not collect this data either.[2]