Whom police kill

[Recursion]

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6051043/how-many-people-killed-police-statistics-homicide-official-black

This graphic was particularly stunning:

The dataset shows 426 homicide victims — in line with the 400 justifiable homicides per year stat that USA Today and other sources have reported. However, it also includes the number of officers who were involved in homicides of felons: 631 officers. The number of officers is higher than the number of homicide victims because 121 victims, or 28.4 percent of all 2012 victims, were shot by multiple officers when they died. About two-thirds were a single victim shot by a single officer; in 1 percent of cases, a single officer shot multiple victims. (According to the 2012 data, only one of the 426 justifiable homicides was not a shooting; it's listed as "death by physical weapons.&quot

The SHR data does not indicate whether victims were armed when they were killed by police. But the ways the homicides are classified can offer clues as to how urgent or dangerous a situation was when the shooting occurred.

There are six different subcategories of "felon killed by an officer." Three are cases where police said the victim was attacking someone when he was killed. These reports may or may not be accurate, and can boil down to an officer's word. (Based on Wilson's account of the killing of Brown, for example, the Ferguson Police Department could submit his death to the FBI as a "felon killed by an officer, attacking the officer.&quot But they represent the cases in which the officers who killed someone claimed that there was an urgent safety need for them to do so.

The other three are cases where police say the victim "attempted flight" from police, "was killed in the commission of a crime," or "resisted arrest." Those are all "justifiable" homicides, according to the FBI's definition. But they're less clear in indicating whether the officer's actions were necessary.

(But see the whole article for the limits of this dataset.)