“Post series on police shootings wins Pulitzer Prize for national reporting,”
“After covering several high-profile incidents involving the killings of civilians by police officers in 2014, Washington Post staff writer Wesley Lowery was surprised to discover that there were no official statistics about such fatalities. So Lowery pitched an idea to his editors: The newspaper, he suggested, should collect the information itself and analyze it for patterns in law enforcement. The Post soon marshaled an extraordinary team of reporters, editors, researchers, photographers and graphic artists to do just that. The result was a database containing the details of 990 fatal police shootings across the nation in 2015 and a series of articles describing trends in the data.
The police-shootings database — painstakingly assembled by researchers Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins from official and unofficial sources — included more than a dozen details about each incident, including the age and race of the person killed, whether and how the person was armed, and the circumstances that led to the encounter with police. It soon yielded new insights into the use of deadly force by the nation’s police officers.
The data showed, for example, that about one-quarter of those fatally shot had a history of mental illness; that most of those killed were white men (although unarmed African Americans were at vastly higher risk of being shot after routine traffic stops than any other group); and that 55 officers involved in fatal shootings in 2015 had previously been involved in a deadly incident while on duty.
One quarter of fatal shootings involved a fleeing suspect.
One in ten people shot and killed by police were unarmed.Fatal shootings of unarmed civilians sparked much of the national debate over police use of deadly force.
The Post found that 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim. The unarmed victims were disproportionately black. In a Post analysis looking at population-adjusted rates, unarmed black men were seven times as likely as unarmed whites to die from police gunfire.
Overall, more than half of those killed in 2015 had guns, 16 percent had knives and 5 percent attempted to hit officers with their vehicles. Three percent had toy weapons, typically replica guns that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Indictments of police officers tripled in 2015, compared with previous years.
Six percent of the killings were captured by body cameras.
