by Jim Rose in economics of crime, law and economics, politics - USA Tags: crime and punishment, law and order, police, police shootings, road accidents, road safety

I followed the coding by the Guardian despite reservations. Including those struck by police cars in routine accidents, none of them police chases, conflates one database with another and does not touch on the issue of the wisdom of police car chases. Including people who drive cars at police or flee with kidnapped children in a car is stretching the definition of unarmed. The wisdom of shooting at a car with children in it is a separate issue. The safety of the hostage taker is not a responsibility of the police, the safety of the children kidnapped in that car was.

Source: The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive | US news | The Guardian accessed 1 p.m. 16 September 2015 New Zealand standard Time.

About 10% of police shootings of unarmed people resulted in murder charges and a few of those still under investigation read as suspicious and may result in charges as well as more evidence is gathered.

Our count as of this afternoon is 823. Have a tip? Tweet us at @thecounted or visit theguardian.com/thecounted/tips http://t.co/96AM7pNPGH—

The Counted (@thecounted) September 14, 2015

That 10% figure of police shootings that result in murder charges is much higher if you exclude people who collapsed while in contact with police from underlying poor health either in a struggle or after being tasered – 20 or more out of 62, drove cars at police (3), killed in crossfire (2) or were killed in police car accidents (5). The figure is even higher when you exclude a good number of those who are struggling with police and the police fired in self defence lawfully. That is, if a police officer shoot someone at a safe distance without good cause, they face a high probability of being charged with murder.

The database I used today for the above figure on shooting of unarmed Blacks takes less than an hour to work your way through to code them for yourself, so if you doubt my coding, do your own coding and put up a rival figure. I will even consider a guest blog by you if you lack a forum.

Update: When I shared this post on the dataisbeautiful sub-reddit, the first comment on that post was to denounce me as a racist for sharing.