The Washington Post Downplays the Number of People Killed by Police in 2015

[marmar]

The Washington Post Downplays the Number of People Killed by Police in 2015

Thursday, 31 December 2015 11:12
By Jim Naureckas, FAIR | News Analysis


Concerned that official records undercount the number of people shot and killed by police in the United States every year, the Washington Post attempted to compile a list of every fatal police shooting in 2015. The paper found nearly a thousand such cases - more than twice as many as the FBI reports in a typical year.

The Post's project - which corroborates a similar tally conducted by the British Guardian - is a journalistic accomplishment, as well as an achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has worked to call attention to police violence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

But it's hard for me to escape the feeling that the Post story - by Kimberly Kindy and Marc Fisher - was framed by the paper to minimize the project's remarkable findings. Take the first paragraph that summarizes details of the results:

In a year-long study, the Washington Post found that the kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many US communities - most often, white police officers killing unarmed black men - represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Meanwhile, the Post found that the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: They were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to halt.

"The kind of incidents that have ignited protests…represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings": That sure sounds like an attempt to play down the number, doesn't it? Particularly since the write-up never presents the raw number for fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in 2015 - which is 37 - or the more comprehensive number of all unarmed civilians shot and killed: 90. Those numbers can be found on a graphic that accompanied the story in the paper's print edition, and in an interactive feature online–but are nowhere to be found in the Post's own article on its project. ("Just 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim," a sidebar accompanying the graphic began - that word "just" indicating that we should read that as "not so many.&quot ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34246-the-washington-post-downplays-the-number-of-people-killed-by-police-in-2015