By Deron Dalton
This has been the year of policing the police.
In 2015, activists and journalists documented and shared moments of police violence, while new efforts emerged to report comprehensible data on civilians who were killed by the police in the U.S., to provide solutions to related failures of government agencies.
The movement to report data on police killings—the ones that happen out in the open and increasingly on video—has its vast challenges. But there’s another issue that remains both harder to grasp and far more complex: deaths in police custody.
Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, Kindra Chapman, Freddie Gray, and Terrell Day—all died in police custody this year, sparking campaigns and outcry among Black Lives Matter supporters. Like most deaths in police custody, each of these cases poses its own set of challenges in unearthing what really happened.
Black civilians are disproportionately killed by police, and some of these cases clearly happened in custody. Others died in police custody under questionable circumstances classified as death from self-inflicted injury or natural causes.
Read more via The Daily Dot.