Inside the grassroots effort to track police violence in the U.S. | The Daily Dot

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By Deron Dalton

Shining the cold, hard light of data on one of the most hot-button issues facing America today. Illustration by Max Fleishman, The Daily Dot.
Shining the cold, hard light of data on one of the most hot-button issues facing America today. Illustration by Max Fleishman, The Daily Dot.

In the era of Big Data and online advertising, when virtually every aspect of our lives is recorded, one key bit of data has been conspicuously absent: The number of Americans killed by police.

Until now.

After former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in August 2014, government agencies, like the FBI, CDC and Bureau of Justice Statistics, received heat for failing to report comprehensible data on police killings nationwide.

According to a study, the Bureau of Justice Statistics undercounted the number of people killed by police by more than 50 percent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn’t required state and local law enforcement to submit data on police killings, thought the agency recently said it plans to collect better data on police killings.

Read more via The Daily Dot.

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