The Guardian
The number of people killed by police in the United States during
2015 reached 500 on Wednesday, according to a Guardian investigation,
after two young black men were shot dead in New York City and Cincinnati.
Isiah Hampton, 19, was fatally shot by New York police department
officers at an apartment building in the Bronx on Wednesday morning,
according to police chiefs. His death followed that of Quandavier Hicks,
22, during a confrontation with Cincinnati officers at a house on
Tuesday night.
Their names were added to The Counted, a project by the Guardian to report and crowd-source names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year.
The federal government does not currently keep a comprehensive record
of people killed by police. Instead the FBI runs a voluntary program to
submit numbers of “justified homicides”.
The updated findings on fatalities so far this year means that the
total is on track to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2015 – and that people are being killed by officers at more than twice the rate most recently detected by the much-criticised FBI system, which recorded 461 killed in 2013.