People Killed by Police in United States, 2015

US police and other law enforcement agencies killed 1,146 persons last year, according to "The Counted", project by The Guardian, which is aimed to build a comprehensive record of such fatalities, monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how those people died. Approximately 20% of all persons killed had not attempted to use weapons, whereas roughly 50% of them attempted to use or used firearm. Nevertheless, this information is difficult to verify because often the only information available comes directly from law enforcement officials. In some cases, friends and relatives of people killed will dispute this official account. Helping to contribute to ongoing national conversations about race and policing, the Guardian has made every effort to find and express a race/ethnicity for all the individuals represented in the database. Thus, we now can observe the distribution of fatalities by race/ethnicity with whites contributing to a half of all cases.