Journalist starts crowd-sourced project to track police shootings

[image credit: regressing.deadspin.com]

Police shootings are hard to evaluate because no data is available

The United States has no database of police shootings. There is no standardized process by which officers log when they've discharged their weapons and why. There is no central infrastructure for handling that information and making it public. Researchers, confronted with the reality that there are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, aren't even sure how you'd go about setting one up. No one is keeping track of how many American citizens are shot by their police.

Solution: Compile a database on every police shooting

A Deadspin project is utilizing crowdsourced contributions to compile a complete list of all police shootings in the U.S. Volunteers are asked to research a specific day from the previous year and find all instances in online newspaper archives where a police officer discharged their weapon.

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• regressing.deadspin.com | We're Compiling Every Police-Involved Shooting In America. Help Us.