Vox Populi:

Last year was the deadliest on record for police killings in the United States. According to a Washington Post database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people in 2022.

And that’s likely an understatement. According to Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Campaign Zero, the Post ​“only captures incidents where a police officer discharges their firearm and the victim is killed.”

This means that it wouldn’t count the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, for example, which resulted from asphyxiation. Nor would it count the killing of Tyre Nichols, who was brutally beaten to death by Memphis police this year.

In contrast, Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project includes any action that a law enforcement officer takes that results in a fatal encounter. Rad’s project counted 1,158 police killings in 2021 compared to 1,048 for the Post. (Final results for 2022 are not yet available.)

The upshot is that in spite of the huge public attention to police violence since 2020, police are actually killing more people than before. We can expect 2023 to be even deadlier if the years-long trend continues.

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