According to a statement by the “Washington Post” made for seven years, police shots give a thousand dead each year. A stable figure, but which does not arouse any debates in the country.
by Arnaud Leparmentier (New York, correspondent)
Three: This is the number of people who die daily in the United States, killed by American police in service. According to the annual statement of the Washington Post, Published on December 31 , the figure reached 1,093 dead in 2022. Each year, it increases slightly: “alone” 965 dead had been recorded in 2015, the first year of the census established by the American daily, which had undertaken this count after the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American with six bullets, in Ferguson, in the suburbs of Saint Louis (Missouri). The young man, suspected of theft, was disarmed, and his death on August 9, 2014, had caused demonstrations leading to the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, since then, nothing has really changed. The murder of George Floyd, also African-American, suffocated by a white police officer from Minneapolis (Minnessota), in May 2020, and the unprecedented wave of protests that he aroused across the country, did not slow down the trend.
In total, since the start of the Washington Post count, seven years ago, 8,079 people died. African-Americans (1,895 dead) are proportionally killed 2.5 times more than non-Hispanic whites (3,593 dead). Latin American (1,278 dead) have 10 % more risk than whites to be targeted by the police. More than half of the dead are between 20 and 40 years old, and 95 % of them are men; 83 % of the victims were armed when they were killed, while 6 % were not, with certainty.
This massacre is incommensurate with what is happening in other Western countries. According to a compilation, carried out, in 2020, by the Center Prison Policy Initiative, the rate of police in the United States is 3.4 times higher than that of Canada, twenty-five times higher than in Germany and sixty -Six time higher than that of England and Wales. In France, for a population five times lower, the last available report from the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) reports thirty-two deaths in 2020 occurring during a police intervention, of which eleven by use weapon or physical strength (the rest resulting from suicides, road accidents, or being linked to the victim’s state of health). French police therefore kill about twenty times less than in the United States.
proliferation of weapons
This situation is however little debated across the Atlantic. FBI statistics are increasingly incomplete, because local and state authorities do not bother to go up the information. Result: the federal office displays a number of deaths in permanent decline: 452 in 2015, 301 in 2020, 168 in 2021, figures that do not correspond to documented reality by case by case by the Washington Post.
You have 49.8% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.