Exclusive: In 179 Fatalities Involving On
A Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict white NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Eric Garner a black father of six stunned large swaths of the city and added fuel to a nationwide surge of protests over police killings.
But history shows the odds were always in Pantaleo’s favor.
A Daily News investigation found that at least 179 people were killed by on-duty NYPD officers over the past 15 years. Just three of the deaths have led to an indictment in state court. In another case, a judge threw out the indictment on technical grounds and it was not reinstated.
Only one officer who killed someone while on duty has been convicted, but he was not sentenced to jail time.
The analysis of the police-involved deaths begins with the 1999 slaying of unarmed Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets and ends with last month’s shooting death of Akai Gurley, who police say was hit by a ricocheting bullet fired by a rookie cop in a darkened housing project stairwell in Brooklyn. Gurley was also unarmed.
The News found that since 1999:
- Roughly 27% of people killed by cops were unarmed.
- Where race was known, 86% were black or Hispanic.
- Twenty-one people were killed three of them by off-duty cops in 2012, the highest during the 15-year span.
Former NYPD Officer Bryan Conroy was convicted in 2005 of criminally negligent homicide for gunning down West African immigrant Ousmane Zongo, 43, during a counterfeit goods raid at a Chelsea warehouse two years earlier.
Darrell William Mobley Sr
Syracuse, New York
According to CBS affiliate WRGB, 48-year-old Darrell Mobley was shot and killed by a Syracuse police officer after police responded to reports of a burglary in progress.
Police said when they arrived at the scene, Mobley was holding a knife. Mobley allegedly stabbed an officer in the neck, prompting the officer to fire multiple rounds at Mobley, hitting him once. The officer was not wearing a body camera.
Mobley died at the hospital.
An Analysis Of Police Violence Also Shows That The National Vital Statistics System Misclassified And Underreported About 55% Of The Estimated Deaths By Law Enforcement For Nearly 30 Years
Research shows that deaths at the hands of police officers impact people of certain races and ethnicities more, pointing to systemic racism in policing, according to a scientific report in The Lancet.
Recent high-profile killings by police. have prompted calls for more extensive and public data reporting on police violence, which is an urgent public health crisis in the U.S., according to the study by the GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators.
Black people are killed by police at nearly two and a half times the rate of white people, studies show. Widely publicized violent acts, such as police killings of Black people and decisions not to indict the officers involved in the incidents, may harm the mental health of Black communities, a recent study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.
Nearly 2,000 police overhaul and accountability bills in all states and Washington, D.C. have been filed as federal and state lawmakers face pressure to respond to continued police shootings and nationwide protests.
Across all races and states in the U.S., the report in The Lancet estimates approximately 31,000 deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018, representing about 17,000 more deaths than reported by the National Vital Statistics System.
According to the report, the top five states with the highest underreporting rates were:
- Oklahoma
The five states with the lowest underreporting rates in the same time frame were:
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More Than 100 People Killed By Police Across Us During Three Weeks Of Chauvin Trial
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Posted April 20, 2021 6:52 p.m. EDTUpdated April 21, 2021 7:23 p.m. EDT
A hang-up phone call to 911 prompted Person County Sheriffs deputies to dispatch to a home in Hurdle Mills on April 2. When they arrived, police came upon a hostage situation underway, according to law enforcement members. Shots were exchanged, and 58-year-old Jackie Cameron Capps Jr. was shot dead.
That incident in central North Carolina is one of dozens that have happened since the beginning of Derek Chauvins trial on March 29.
“One case – that’s one too many,” said Dr. Hunter Boehme, a criminologist and assistant professor at North Carolina Central University.
There are many cases. On average over the last five years, three people have died every day at the hands of police.
In the 22 days between the start of the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer and his conviction, 103 people were shot and killed by law enforcement, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Thats more than four people a day.
Very few officers wind up as defendants
Chauvin is the first white police officer in Minnesota convicted of killing a Black citizen. Officers are often cleared of wrongdoing because the use of force is found to be justified. Data shows only 1.1% of police involved in these killings will ever be charged with murder or manslaughter.
Throughout that period, between 900 and 1,100 people were killed by law enforcement annually, research from the university and Mapping Police Violence shows.
Harvard Study Shows Actual Number Of People Killed By Us Police
“The public needs better data about who is being killed.”
In a revelatory new study published Tuesday, Harvard public health researchers report that in 2015, a total of 1,166 people were killed by police in the United States. Whatâs staggering about this research is not just the massive number of police killings it reports â and knowing that many of those police arenât disciplined, â but the fact that scientists were able to conduct the study at all. Historically, the U.S. government has been unable to provide a full count of people killed by police that has the confidence of federal statisticians.
This new study, published Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, is the first to quantify the undercounting of police-related deaths in both a nationwide death certificate data and in a news media-based database â which makes it the most accurate count the public has to date.
People deserve to know how many people have actually been killed by police, study co-author Justin Feldman tells Inverse. They also deserve to see that information, he adds, in an accurate way from a credible source.
âThereâs also a narrower message directly to the public health community, which is that we are already responsible for collecting data on causes of death, and weâre not doing a good job in this particular instance,â says Feldman, a social epidemiologist and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Arent More White People Than Black People Killed By Police Yes But No
Dylan Noble died on the last Saturday of June.
Police in Fresno, Calif., received a report of a man walking a downtown street with a rifle, but when they arrived, they instead found Noble speeding by in his pickup truck.
When they tried to pull him over, the 19-year-old led police to a nearby gas station and then exited his car.
The driver then turned towards officers with one hand concealed behind his back, and told officers he hated his life, the Fresno police department said in a statement. As he continued to advance towards officers, an officer-involved shooting occurred.
The department framed it as a suicide by cop. His family insisted that could not be the case, urged federal officials to investigate and demanded that video from the body cameras worn by both officers involved be released.
I am outraged that the police would shoot my son and say that it is his fault, Veronica Nelson, Nobles mother, told reporters at a news conference not long after the shooting. So please join me as Im demanding justice for Dylan.
Nobles friends and family gathered for days at the gas station parking lot where he was killed some waving Confederate flags and others chanting, White lives matter.
And soon, they were angry at their inability to garner more attention. At a time when dozens of police killings have prompted outrage, why hadnt this one? Was it because Noble was white?
New Data From Mapping Police Violence Reveals That 979 People Died In The Us Following Police Encounters Since George Floyd Was Murdered In May 2020
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A Black Lives Matter activist holds a sign against police brutality in front of the Ohio Statehouse in reaction to the shooting of Makiyah Bryant on April 20, 2021 in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus Police Shot and killed Makiyah Bryant, 16 years old, on April 20, 2021 sparking outrage from the community.
Nearly 1,000 people in the US were allegedly killed in police encounters in the 11-months between the murder of George Floyd and the conviction of the officer, Derek Chauvin, who killed him, it has been reported.
An estimated 979 people died following an incident involving law enforcement between May 2020 and April 2021, according to data collected by the Mapping Police Violence website, including 181 Black people.
Of the total 1,127 deaths in 2020, which include some police staff, only 16 cases, amounting to 1.4%, resulted in criminal charges against officers, as reported by Newsweek.
The figures revealed that Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police in the US, making up 28% of the people whose deaths involved law enforcement in 2020, despite them making up 13% of the population of the US.
Damarra Atkins paid her respects to George Floyd at a mural at George Floyd Square, Friday, April 23, 2021, in Minneapolis, where he was killed in May 2020.
His death, captured on video by a teenage bystander, sparked global Black Lives Matter protests.
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In One Year 57375 Years Of Life Were Lost To Police Violence
A new study finds that police killings exact a toll greater than accidental gun deaths.
People killed by police in 2015 and 2016 had a median age of 35, and they still had an average of about 50 years left to live when they died. Its this metricthe gap between how long someone lives and how long they were expected to livethats the focus of a new study by Anthony Bui, Matthew Coates, and Ellicott Matthay in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
To find the true toll of police violence, the authors focused on years of life lost. They used data from The Counted, a Guardian database of people killed by police, to find the races and ages of everyone who died at the hands of police in the United States, then compared them to the average life expectancy for those groups.
Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found that 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic. Together, these individuals lost 57,375 years to police violence in 2015 and 54,754 to police violence in 2016. Young people and people of color were disproportionately affected: 52 percent of all the years of life lost belonged to nonwhite, non-Hispanic ethnic groups. Whites also tended to be killed by police at older ages than African Americans and Hispanicsthough this is partly because, in the general population, whites are older on average than the other groups.
Police Violence Is A Systemic Problem In The Us Not Simply Incidental And It Happens On A Scale Far Greater Than Other Wealthy Nations
by Alexi Jones and Wendy Sawyer,June 5, 2020
There is no question that the number of police killings of civilians in the U.S. who are disproportionately Black and other people of color are the result of policies and practices that enable and even encourage police violence. Compared to police in other wealthy democracies, American police kill civilians at incredibly high rates:
The chart above compares the annual rates of police killings in each country, accounting for differences in population size. This is the most apples-to-apples comparison we can make with this data.1 But the total number of deaths at the hands of police is also worth seeing in comparison with other countries:
The sources for these charts are listed in the table below. For more statistics on police, arrests, and incarceration in the United States, see these other pages:
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Police In The Us Killed 164 Black People In The First 8 Months Of 2020 These Are Their Names
On May 25, George Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. The incident sparked international protests against racism and police brutality but in the wake of this mass call for change, police are still killing Black men and women at disproportionate rates.
Using databases from Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, CBS News has compiled a list of 164 Black men and women who were killed by police from January 1 to August 31, 2020. Many of the cases remain under investigation.
This data is based on reported and verified cases, and does not necessarily account for all incidents in which a person was killed by police. But based on the known cases, police have killed at least one Black person every week since January 1, and only two states Rhode Island and Vermont have reported no killings by police this year.
Here are the known names and cases of the Black men and women who have been killed by police so far this year.
Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns
That realization isn’t entirely new. After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., news organizations started to keep their own tallies of police-related deaths, which turned out to be higher than the government’s numbers.
What Murray and his co-authors have done, though, is measure the discrepancy between independent tallies and the government data, and project it back in time.
“We’ve used those relationships of what fraction get underreported to go back and infer, for example, in the 1980s, what was the likely number of police violence deaths,” Murray says.
The researchers based their inferences on numbers from three open-source databases: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence and The Guardian‘s The Counted, which they compared with the data from the death certificates.
They calculate that the death certificates misclassified the cause of death on more than 17,000 such deaths since 1980.
“If it’s legit, it’s pretty cool how they can take existing data from a short time frame and work backwards,” says Justin Nix, associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska.
But as a criminologist who studies shootings by police, Nix has reservations about the underlying data.
“My concerns with this paper are the same as many that use these crowd-sourced databases,” he says. He has documented cases where the databases count, for example, domestic violence by off-duty officers as police killings.
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The Unknown Unknown: How Are The Victims Who Aren’t Counted Different From The Victims Who Are
The fundamental question about the FBI’s data is: is it representative of all police homicides, even if it isn’t exhaustive? Or are the homicides that aren’t reported statistically different from the ones that are?
Roman of the Urban Institute, who’s worked with this report in the past, is confident that “the limitations of the data are more administrative and clerical than they are biased.” In other words, it’s not that agencies are deliberately deciding not to report some cases it’s just that some agencies happen to participate in the optional report, and others don’t. That means the FBI’s data ought to be at least somewhat representative.
But Ball believes that’s impossible: “There’s a reason some of them don’t get reported,” whether it’s because of the agency or the particular details of the case. So while he can’t lay out the exact differences between unreported officer-involved homicides and the ones reported to the FBI, he’s confident that some difference exists.
At the end of the day, it’s still true that we don’t know how many people are killed by police in America. We know some things about some people who are killed by police. The facts we do know are enough to make it clear that more information is needed and enough to suggest that the racial disparities in the American criminal justice system extend to the barrel of an officer’s gun.
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Already A Particularly Deadly Year For People Killed In Police Encounters Cbc Research Shows
CBCâs Deadly Force database looks at role of race, mental health in deaths
Inayat SinghCBC News ⢠July 23, 2020
It has already been a particularly deadly year in terms of people killed in encounters with police in Canada â and Black and Indigenous people continue to be over-represented among the fatalities.
There were 30 people killed after police used force in Canada in the first half of 2020, which is the full-year average for such deaths over the past 10 years . This is according to the Deadly Force database, updated and maintained by the CBCâs own researchers.
The database shows Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented amongst the victims compared to their share of the overall population.
The data also finds most of those killed in police encounters suffer from mental illness or substance abuse.
There is no government database listing deaths at the hands of the police available to the public in Canada, so CBC News created its own. The CBCâs research librarians have collected detailed information on each case, such as ethnicity, the role of mental illness or substance abuse, the type of weapon used and the police service involved, to create a picture of who is dying in police encounters.
The database focuses onfatal encounters where police used force. It does not include in-custody deaths, self-inflicted wounds as a result of suicide or attempts to evade police, or accidental police-caused deaths .
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