Police Killed A Record Number Of People Last Year

It gets worse every year; and while it per­sists, courts push the bound­aries of creduli­ty to give them cov­er, where­upon they kill with greater impuni­ty and with greater bar­barism. (mb)

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1,176 people were killed in encounters with police last year, a third of them during a traffic stop, mental health and welfare check, or non-violent offense.

By Trone Dowd

American police killed more peo­ple last year than they have in near­ly a decade, accord­ing to a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that has tracked and pub­lished data on dead­ly state vio­lence since 2013.
Mapping Police Violence’s 2022 track­ing found that 1,176 peo­ple died dur­ing encoun­ters with police last year, the high­est num­ber the orga­ni­za­tion has ever record­ed. Samuel Sinyangwe, the cre­ator of the project, said the num­ber includes any­one who was killed by police, be it by shoot­ing or oth­er forms of force. According to Mapping Police Violence, police killed the equiv­a­lent of 3.2 peo­ple per day in 2022 — and there were only 12 days in the whole year when a dead­ly police encounter was not reported. 

More than a third of those killed by police encoun­tered the author­i­ties dur­ing a traf­fic stop, a men­tal health and wel­fare check, or a non-vio­lent offense. All three of these caus­es for a police stop have been tar­get­ed for reform in mul­ti­ple states because of how dead­ly they can be for civil­ians, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are not white. Elected lead­ers in Minnesota, California, and Pennsylvania for exam­ple, have passed leg­is­la­tion or enforced new poli­cies de-pri­or­i­tiz­ing non-pub­lic safe­ty traf­fic stops. Aurora, Colo. has seen a sig­nif­i­cant push to reform how police inter­act with the men­tal­ly ill, and to give them the tools to deesca­late these sit­u­a­tions at risk of becom­ing violent.

As has been true for the last nine years, Mapping Police Violence’s data shows that Black peo­ple made up a dis­pro­por­tion­ate chunk of those killed by cops in 2022, account­ing for 24 per­cent of those killed, despite mak­ing up just over 13 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. One in three peo­ple killed by the police was flee­ing the cops when they were killed, with Black, Hispanic, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders at least five to eight per­cent more like­ly to be killed while run­ning or dri­ving away com­pared to their white counterparts.

Perhaps the most alarm­ing is how lit­tle account­abil­i­ty there has been as the num­ber of police killings con­tin­ues to grow. Though some of the high­est pro­file instances of police vio­lence saw a con­vic­tion in recent years, includ­ing that of Derek Chauvin in 2021, the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of offi­cers still face no legal con­se­quences when they take a life. According to the data, 98.1 per­cent of offi­cers involved in the death of a cit­i­zen between 2013 and 2022 faced no charges. Less than 0.3 per­cent of offi­cers were convicted.

The five depart­ments in the coun­try with the most dead­ly inci­dents were also locat­ed in some of the dens­est cities. The Los Angeles Police Department topped the list with 15 killings last year, fol­lowed by the Houston Police Department with 14 and the New York Police Department with 13. Members of the Albuquerque Police Department and the Phoenix Police Department killed 11 and 10 peo­ple respectively.

While 2022 was a record year, data shows that police vio­lence has been on the rise nation­al­ly since 2019. Last year 1,140 peo­ple were killed by police, just five deaths short of the pre­vi­ous record high set in 2018.

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