Three: the number of people who die daily in the United States, killed by American police officers on duty. According to the annual count of washington post, published on December 31, the figure reached 1,093 deaths in 2022. Each year, it increases slightly: “only” 965 deaths were counted in 2015, the first year of the census established by the American daily, which had undertaken this count after the death of Michael Brown , an 18-year-old African-American shot six times, in Ferguson, a suburb of Saint Louis, Missouri. The young man, suspected of theft, was unarmed, and his death on August 9, 2014 provoked demonstrations leading to the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, since then, nothing has really changed. The Murder of George Floyd, also African-American, suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis (Minnessota), in May 2020, and the unprecedented wave of protests he has sparked across the country, have not slowed down the tendency.
In total, since the beginning of the countdown of the washington post, seven years ago, 8,079 people died. African Americans (1,895 dead) are proportionally killed 2.5 times more than non-Hispanic whites (3,593 dead). Latin Americans (1,278 dead) are 10% more likely than whites to be targeted by the police. More than half of the dead are between 20 and 40 years old, and 95% of them are men; 83% of the victims were armed when they were killed, while 6% were not, with certainty.
This carnage is out of all proportion to what is happening in other Western countries. According to a 2020 compilation by the Prison Policy Initiative, the rate of police killings in the United States is 3.4 times higher than in Canada, twenty-five times higher than in Germany and sixty -six times that of England and Wales. In France, for a population five times smaller, the latest available report from the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) reports thirty-two deaths in 2020 during a police intervention, including eleven by use weapon or physical force (the rest resulting from suicides, road accidents, or being related to the state of health of the victim). The French police therefore kill about twenty times less than in the United States.
Arms proliferation
However, this situation is little debated across the Atlantic. The FBI’s statistics are increasingly incomplete, because local and state authorities do not bother to trace the information. Result: the Federal Office shows a number of deaths in permanent decline: 452 in 2015, 301 in 2020, 168 in 2021, figures which do not correspond to the reality documented case by case by the Washington Post.
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