Black Lives Matter
60 Bullets, Jayland Walker and 22 Seconds
The police shooting crisis against unarmed Black men continues
After the tragic 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, (an unarmed Black man in Ferguson, Missouri), an investigation by the Washington Post found that the FBI undercounted police fatal shootings by more than half. This story delved into how reporting by police departments is not required, and as a result, many departments fail to do so.
From 2015 to the present, more than 5,000 fatal police shootings have been recorded by The Washington Post. Since January, 1,042 people have been shot and killed by police. And the year isn’t over yet.
Five years' worth of analysis primarily relied upon news accounts, social media, and police reports revealing one constant victim demographic: unarmed Black men. And despite the unpredictable circumstances that lead to fatal police shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of unarmed Black men annually— nearly 1,000 — since 2015.
The consensus is clear: police shootings remain at a steady rate despite supposed attempts to reform police brutality and shootings, and unarmed Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than any other racial demographic.
