The Washington Post Tracks Police Shootings in 2015

The Washington Post data team announced recently that it has created a database to track fatal shootings by on-duty police in 2015. The project is in part designed to address the shortcomings of existing metrics; though some information is gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the topic, the Justice Department admits that the FBI’s data on arrest-related deaths has "significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability.” This new database includes many details about each killing and are collected through multiple sources.To create a comprehensive record, The Post is soliciting information on shootings, including “videos of fatal encounters with police,” from the public.

an example of the visualizations generated by the new Washington Post site showing shootings per month in 2015

To create a comprehensive record, The Post is soliciting information on shootings, including “videos of fatal encounters with police,” from the public. The data set is updated regularly and available for download on GitHub however users are able to sort the data using various attributes within the webpage. This allows the public to focus on even more specific demographics (including race, mental illness, age). Below are examples of the graphics generated when one filters to look at just victims who were identified as Black (140 of 558 victims as of the time of writing).

The Post has limited the scope of the database to include “only shootings in which a police officer, while on duty, shot and killed a civilian... The Post is not tracking deaths of people in custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or deaths in which police gunfire did not kill the individual.” Since the launch of the report on June 30th of this year, 90 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers.

Data in the News previously reported on this subject in April of this year after Vox collected similar data from 2000 to April of this year though Vox's map (pictured below) had a broader scope and included many other causes of death.


map created by Vox of people killed by police from 2000-April 2015

The map created by Vox relied on data compiled by Fatal Encounters, a project lead by D. Brian Burghart to create a “comprehensive national database of people who are killed through interactions with police” Burghart estimates that his organization's collection only captures about 35 percent of total police killings. Fatal Encounters also shares its data after submissions are fact check and the public can be downloaded here. The Fatal Encounters invites the public to submit reports and create visualizations using their data.