WaPo | Even amid the coronavirus
pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot
and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the
same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most
in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents.
The year-over-year consistency has confounded those who have spent decades studying the issue.
“It
is difficult to explain why we haven’t seen significant fluctuations in
the shooting from year to year,” former Charlotte police chief Darrel
Stephens said. “There’s been significant investments that have been made
in de-escalation training. There’s been a lot of work.”
The
overwhelming majority of people killed are armed. Nearly half of all
people fatally shot by police are white. Most of these shootings draw
little or no attention beyond a news story.
Some
become flash points in the country’s ongoing reckoning about race and
police. The ones prompting the loudest outcries often involve people who
are black, unarmed, or both, shootings that have led to the harshest
scrutiny of police.
Since The Post began tracking the shootings, black people have been shot and killed by police at disproportionate rates
— both in terms of overall shootings and the shootings of unarmed
Americans. The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police
has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are
still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white
people.
