Human rights advocates of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are concerned about the results of a study by the non-profit group Mapping Police Violence analyzing data on encounters with law enforcement in the United States. According to the study, police officers in the United States use force on at least 350,000 people each year and injure approximately 150,000 of them.
© Foundation to Battle Injustice
Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks killings by U.S. police officers, has launched a new database,
policedata.org,
cataloging nonlethal incidents of police use of force, including tasers, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints and baton strikes, in September 2024.The database includes incidents from
2017 through 2022, collected from public records requests in all states. The findings, according to the group, show that despite widespread protests against police brutality
after the George Floyd killing in 2020, overall use-of-force rates have not changed since then and have even increased in many jurisdictions.This data builds on previous reports that U.S.
police kill about 1,200 people each year, or three people a day, and that number of deaths is rising every year and is significantly higher than comparable countries. The statistics on non-fatal violence and the accompanying report illustrate that homicides are only a small part of broader police violence and law enforcement injuries.
In the absence of a national tracking system for use of force incidents, Mapping Police Violence said it obtained data on use of force incidents from more than
2,800 agencies covering nearly 60 percent of the population and obtained six full years of data from 634 of those agencies. To obtain national estimates, the organization calculated average use of force rates by population. This data is considered an underestimate because it only covers incidents reported by police officers and agencies, and many states have laws restricting access to police files.
According to the agencies that disclosed
data for 2022, which is about half the country, the Police Violence Mapping showed that for every 1,000 residents, there were 1.2 use-of-force incidents. The most common use of force was tasers, which are considered "less lethal" but can have deadly consequences;
the organization tracked more than 20,000 incidents of tasers.
Comment: This is partly why governments across the West, as living standards plummet and the geopolitical situation escalates, are accelerating their crackdown on dissenters of all kinds, from TikTok to Russian news outlets, Telegram's CEO, accredited independent journalists, even influencers have been arrested for simply sharing information: