guardianjon

Jim Bueermann, the head of the Police Foundation and a former police chief, supports better collection of data on these incidents. He and I were among the guests on KCRW’s To The Point last month, and his answers are well worth listening to: http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/to-the-point/documenting-officer-involved-shootings

We aren’t offering any judgment on whether these actions were necessary or unnecessary. The objective is to record every fatal incident and explain what happened, so that people (and police, and policymakers) can better appreciate the scale of what is happening. Because there is no comprehensive government database, this seems impossible at present.

However if you look through the database you will see that as well as questionable incidents involving unarmed people, there are many in which the person killed was armed and acting violently towards officers in their final moments. We are going to include all of them for your consideration.

It comes from a mixture of sources. Since we launched the project on 1 June, the biggest source of information has been readers sending us messages via email or the submission form on our site –www.theguardian.com/thecounted/tips – with links to local media reports about deaths in their area. Several family members of people who were killed have been in contact to provide information about what happened to their relatives.

Our reporters then verify this information via police officials and public records, and create a new entry in our database if appropriate.

We also monitor social media for mentions by residents and local reporters about fatalities involving police. People tend to use similar phrases when talking about them. Again, once we have these tips we will pursue confirmation through traditional routes.

Some cases have been more difficult to report than others. We identified five people who had never been publicly named by local authorities and media http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/counted-police-killing-victims-unnamed-texas-california Their details came from public records requests and inquiries to coroners and police departments.

Before launching we were aided greatly by the work of crowd-sourced databases such as KilledByPolice.net. We have different criteria, and our database contains a different total and omits some cases counted by KBP. But they were an invaluable pointer towards cases that had already happened when we started counting.

We’ve written an explanation of where our information comes from here: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/about-the-counted

John Legend. He seems like a really good guy.

We are collecting a detailed series of data including those categories you mention and more: age, gender, race/ethnicity, precise location, whether the person was armed, and several others that we aren’t quite ready to publish yet. You can actually sort the data using these fields and download the data set from our site – http://www.theguardian.com/thecounted – to use and experiment with.

The smart people at FiveThirtyEight used the data and wrote a fascinating analysis on what the location data tells us about where people are killed by law enforcement: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-police-have-killed-americans-in-2015/

And Josh Begley, a brilliant data artist, used the location data and Google Earth to visualise the places where the incidents happened: https://joshbegley.com/seeing-police-violence/

In terms of justification, we are keeping track on the official investigations into the incidents and whether they were ruled justified or worthy of prosecution. You can see this in the “STATUS” section of each card in the database.