By David Mendoza - Monday, January 4, 2016

Throughout last year, The Guardian recorded the number of people killed by the police. They found that in 2015 1,136 people died due to law enforcement action. The Guardian’s total is substantially higher than the official numbers kept by the FBI, which averaged only 428 deaths between 2010 and 2014.

This large discrepancy may be due to the fact that the FBI limits its count to “killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty,” whereas The Guardian includes “any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement.” Additionally, the FBI undercounts the number of people killed by the police because, as The Wall Street Journal reports, several police departments do not submit any data of people they’ve killed to the FBI.

The chart below shows that on the vast majority of days in 2015 the police killed multiple people. On only 24 days did the police not kill anyone.

Click here to enlarge this image.

One important thing to note: even though 2015 was replete with examples of the police killing people in apparently unjustifiable circumstances, many — if not most — of the deaths recorded by The Guardian were likely justifiable. For instance, included in their total are people like Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the perpetrators of the massacre in San Bernardino.

Read more about The Counted project by The Guardian here.

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