Police have already killed 1,000 Americans this year

Graph depicting the number of Americans killed by police in 2015.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

The number of Americans killed by police in 2015 has officially topped 1,000, as calculated by a news report-based tally managed by The Guardian.

Though more than half of those killed by police in 2015 were white, black Americans are disproportionately affected: African-Americans are more than twice as likely (5.94 deaths per million) to be the victim of a police killing than white people (2.54 per million).

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The Guardian's project, "The Counted," launched because the federal government "has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement," a fact which has contributed to protests nationwide over the last year and a half. The goal of the tally is to provide information that is "prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.