(Cartoon image is by Jim Morin in The Miami Herald.)I am convinced that the folks at "Black Lives Matter" are correct. There are too many police shootings involving minorities -- and too many of those shooting are not necessary. Unfortunately, too many of my fellow Whites are not convinced of that. Part of it is due to the fact they they don't want to believe it, but another part is that we don't have the hard statistics on police shooting (or deaths in police custody).
Why don't we have those statistics? Because most police departments don't want to do that. They are afraid to let the general public know just how bad the problem is. And the federal government, who should be keeping those statistics, just have not been willing to do the job.
The media has tried to compile statistics, but that is an enormous task and they simply don't have the people to stay in contact with every department in the country -- which results in incomplete or widely differing statistics. For instance, The Washington Post says 759 people have been fatally shot by police this year, while The Guardian puts the total at 891.
Hopefully, it looks like this rather serious problem (a lack of correct data) may soon be corrected. The FBI Director says his department will create a program to monitor police shootings. And the Department of Justice is going even further. They will not only monitor fatal shootings, but also non-fatal shootings and other deaths of people in police custody (from any cause).
I'm glad this is finally happening -- but it's something that should have happened many years ago.
