It didn’t stop with George Floyd.  It didn’t matter how many of us protested, said enough is enough.

“860 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year”

“6869 people have been shot and killed by police since Jan. 1, 2015″.

Both statistics are from The Washington Post and are compiled from a database that the newspaper has been built.  As they’ll admit, their data is likely not complete.  It’s compiled from many sources, sometimes including Facebook postings.  The FBI doesn’t track police killings.  Nor does the Department of Justice.  WAPO does the best they can.

Yes, some, maybe even many, of these killings are so called “justified”, if that means anything.  For example, a situation where a police officer fires back at someone threatening them with a gun.  Regardless, the number of killings has remained steady at around 1000 per year since WAPO started compiling the data.  While our populations are different, the number was 32 in Canada in the first eleven months of 2021.  It was one in England and Wales in 2020/2021.  One.

We need to find a better way.

There were 65 people killed by police in December 2022.  Here is the data compiled by WAPO.

We need a better way.

Be the Pebble