These 4 charts describe police violence in America

Chauvin and three other officers involved in the arrest have been fired. 

The protests against police violence that have erupted across the country have mirrored those that followed the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. Garner, a black man, died after being choked by a white New York City police officer. Garner’s plea, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. 

No comprehensive official database exists for tracking police violence, though there have been efforts at the federal level to create one. But data compiled by researchers have served as an important source of information about how often people in the United States are killed by police, and who is most likely to be killed. 

Last year, more than 1,000 people were killed by police, according to Mapping Police Violence, one research group.

Black people were disproportionately among those killed, the group found. Black people accounted for 24% of those killed, despite making up only about 13% of the population.

Scientists have struggled to study whether racial bias is directly responsible for the disproportionate killing of black people, given limited data on the race of those with whom police regularly come into contact.

Mapping Police Violence, which says that it is able to track more than 90% of killings in the U.S., defines a police killing as any time someone dies as a result of “being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.” 

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/george-floyd-death-police-violence-in-the-us-in-4-charts.html